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According to Forbes, Apple Music Could Wreck Your iTunes Library:
At its heart, Apple Music is a simple proposition. For your monthly subscription fee, Apple will offer you access to a library of over 30 million tracks. You can listen, explore, and discover to your heart's content, and you can take that music with you wherever you go. But subscribing to Apple Music and making full use of the streaming service requires a sacrifice.
You have to hand over control of your iTunes music library to Apple and hope that Cupertino's arrogance will preserve your music collection.
[...] The issue that is upsetting many Apple users is that moment when you turn on iCloud Music for the first time and your tracks are synced to the cloud. Apple's methodology on this is not clear, but from reports and feedback from users across the internet, it appears that Apple's view of metadata and what the 'correct' track is, will take precedence over your custom edits.
The Verge's Chris Welch highlights his preference of listening to early tracks from The Beatles in mono format (just as they were recorded) rather than the automatic matching services' preferences for stereo versions. Support forums talk of collections approaching 20,00 songs becoming corrupted and full of duplicate entries, incorrect meta-data overwriting current entries, album art switched out to show the wrong albums, and more stories of personal pain.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Informative) by theluggage on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:59PM
and sealed off the iphoto directory into a monolithic file (tech note: it's still actually a directory and you can get into it, just not using classic file browser tools).
So in other words, it isn't a monolithic file - its just an app bundle - and getting into it in the "classic file browser tools" is a simple matter of ctrl-click or right-click and "show package contents": just enough to stop ignorant users getting in and screwing up the directory structure and metadata, without stopping anybody with a clue from getting at the original jpg files (iPhoto even maintains an .xml copy of the metadata file that 3rd-party utilities can read). Anything running at "Unix" level (e.g. rsync) just sees a directory, so there's absolutely no reason why a backup utility needs to back it up as a monolithic blob.
Likewise with GP's complaint - iTunes is a very long way from perfect, but the way its stores "local" music is totally transparent and it maintains an .xml file (in an easily deducible format) mirroring most of the metadata and playlist info.
Where I do agree with you is in the way you throw all of this away when you move to Apple's 'cloud' option - I gave up on iCloud ages ago because it was so "all or nothing". There's a place for streaming and a place for purchase (usually after you've streamed an album a couple of times and decided its a keeper) and I'd really prefer to keep a firewall between the two models.