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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-apple-can-do-no-wrong dept.

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. 


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday July 05 2015, @07:52PM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday July 05 2015, @07:52PM (#205356) Journal

    Google Music (available free on any android, mac or windows, or Linux) is the same sort of cloud storage idea as Apple.

    Load your music once, and have your entire collection available anywhere on any device. You can always download your entire collection to your computer/NAS, (which wise people do occasionally).

    I buy or rip all of my music. I buy from several sources, but the download directory is always to the Google Music Upload directory, as is the rip target directory. So everything ends up in my Google Music. Even my old Itunes account went up there without a complaint, although I did pass some of it through a DRM removal process. I stopped doing any business with Apple a long time ago.

    Google Music (and I'm guessing Apple as well) are using massive data de-duplication on your music. If I upload an obscure track, I may have the only copy on their system, and it will remain exactly as I uploaded it.

    But If I upload anything remotely popular from the last 40 years, probably google already has it. And probably in better quality than my rip.

    So I might upload a rip as 192kbps (or something), and after a few days my track on google music will be 320kbps and perfect. If I then download to my computer or android devise I get the high quality version. No DRM is imposed.

    I suppose some purists will grouse about getting a high quality download, that won't be me.

    Like Apple, Google initially had some problems with their scan and match software, where it would substitute the G rated version of explicit songs. But that has been fixed, and if you really want that crappy old clicks and pops from a bootleg rip you did back in college, there is an option to force it to use your version rather then a pristine version.

    There are some trade-offs.

    Music organization: Standardized, not your bastardized organized by year and manufacture of the particular alto sax used. **Kid you not, I know a guy who had only sax music, and had it organized that way. It does not alter your local copy on your computer or your local organization.

    You tend to get higher quality rips at bitrates well above human hearing's ability to discern, which makes for larger files.

    Early adopters had explicit song substituted with the wrong versions, problem since fixed.

    Cover Art drifts. That is intentional and Google says they have no plan to change it. Recording are not released worldwide with identical cover art.

    Disclosure: I like Google music. I don't trust it as the sole repository for my music, but I do like having all my music available everywhere I go. I refuse to join their $10/month plan or their streaming radio plan. It annoys me that I can't remove these options from the menu.

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