Apple deleted files that I owned without telling me. It was inevitable, but I'm still pissed

[thomdunn]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/28/apple-deleted-files-that-i-own.html

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[Grey_Devil]

Clicking to comment through the article is borked and only reloads the article itself, FYI.

That aside never trust any platform to treat your library like its yours as you’ve already mentioned. These kinds of shenanigans aren’t limited to them so as much as i’d like to bash Apple this is something everyone has to be prepared for regardless of what service they use.

[andrewlwood]

Yup, I’ve had this experience too - except I trusted apple’s systems and have permanently lost access to music that I owned (some of it bought from Apple themselves!).
Match is not a reliable backup service.

[StatusQuo]

Same story, different songs. I too had many of my CD’s matched when I moved them into the iTunes cloud. The entire non-streaming side of the app formerly known as iTunes is now a train wreck.

So very unlike Apple, and yet so quintessentially Apple.

[Akimbo_NOT]

I hate the way Apple manages music. Seriously. It sucks.

In addition to missing music, shuffle isn’t shuffle anymore and it’s pissing me off.

[Bonivus_elderheart]

@andrewlwood

Match is not a backup service.

FTFY.

And people wonder why I have a habit of periodically copying all my music that I’ve purchased to a folder that iTunes is ignorant about, and using a third party app (Foobar2k!) to transcode them to mp3 from apple’s format.

Granted, due to… shenanigans, I have three copies of Pink Floyd’s The Wall; mp3 as a monolithic mix, the multi-disc audio CD, and the iTunes iteration.

[mmascari]

@thomdunn

Again, I have backups, so it’s not the end of the world.

Have you uploaded them again to see what happens?

@thomdunn

iTunes Match will upload any of your music, but if matches something that already exists in their library, they’ll let you download the corresponding high-resolution audio files

As soon as this happens, that file you downloaded is no longer your original purchased item. It’s not a quirk, they want to convert you from “music you own” to “music that’s part of the service”.

@thomdunn

What’s particularly frustrating, however, is that I had manually converted the entire Rented World album into non-Apple music files, and re-uploaded those into iTunes Match — specifically to avoid this kind of situation. While I’m not that surprised that Apple still embedded something in the audio files that would allow them to keep tracking the song across different formats, I am appalled that they could and would remove those files from my iTunes Match library as well.

See above. That work around, isn’t really a work around. The matching function replaced all your owned music with copies that are part of the service instead. It’s still a convenient way to know what you own to preload your subscription library. Those files in the Match Library were the Match files, not the original ones.

If the iTunes library kept your original files, and then deleted those because they were no longer part of the service, that would be a serious bug, and unacceptable. It doesn’t sound like this is what happened though.

Also possible, did the upload/match/download replace your original files with ones from the service? That would be just as unacceptable to me. However, it would change the time the harm was done from now when the subscription license changed back to when it was originally uploaded.

I detest the way iTunes manages file because of stuff like this.

I’m genuinely, interested in what happens if you upload them again. Presumably, they shouldn’t match this time, and shouldn’t be converted into service matched files.

[Bonivus_elderheart]

And also, I don’t use the Match service, because uploading ~40 GB of music

[andrewlwood]

It was categorically sold as such, at least in the early days…

[stephen_schenck]

Hold on, though.

If I’m understanding this correctly: you had the WAVs you made of this album. Apple scanned them and used its match feature to let you access its HQ copies. Then Apple later stopped providing access to those HQ copies.

But you never uploaded the WAVs, did you? There wasn’t anything of yours to delete.

[BroccoliofDoom]

It’s still doable, I have 272GB of music uploaded since they removed the cap…

Unfortunately, I’ve seen this same pervasive disappearing of various tracks for a while now. With my old macbook, I pulled the CD drive and added a multi-TB drive to hold all my music, but once I upgraded to the 15" pro even the 1TB makes it untenable to store all the music locally…

[DukeTrout]

@thomdunn

This is, of course, the inevitable risk of buying any kind of digital media — you don’t actually own it. You’re technically just buying a license to access that media, which can be revoked at any time.

Though, if it weren’t for the asymmetrical relationship, if they choose to revoke it they would have to refund your money.

[Tribune]

My daughter plays clarinet and she has a few books of music that come with CDs. I ripped one of them for some unknown reason and at some point Apple mapped it to the same music but for the saxophone. (Each track had one version with the instrument in question and one without so it was not a case of identical music.)

Also it plays the wrong version of a few songs that are close but not right.

[orenwolf]

This shit is part of the fallout from the MP3.com decision - they tried to offer a service to upload your own tracks - for your own use - to the web and were sued out of existence for it. So now “creator rights” trump any sort of user rights.

Copyright laws are broken and need to be fixed for this crap. Then the music-locker services of the world (which, of course, there are few of because who wants to wade through this legal minefield) can finally just let you stream the music you own, to yourself, without rightsholder intervention.

[Alvin_Goodman]

Back in 1984, there was a service where you could call a phone number, enter your account # (touch-tone only, sorry rotary!) then play your song (through the handset) and the service would record it on a massive reel to reel tape.

To listen to the music, you call in, enter account, enter the song # you want, wait a few mins for the tape to spool to the right spot, then it would play the tune.

I mean, amazing! Imagine, not having to carry around your briefcase full of cassettes, your music was only a phone call away. Yeah, it sucked that you needed to have Ma Bell or AT&T service, but there were payphones on every corner so not a problem. Also now and then their giant tape would break and you would lose all the music, but nothing’s perfect.

---

Above is a parody , but just barely.

[SamWinston]

I remember seeing and reading all these SF stories and movies where all human knowledge is lost.
Libraries laid waste from disuse and books crumbling on the shelves. I remember those stories and thinking ‘how could that even happen’…and now I’m starting to realize it won’t even involve a nuclear war.

[douglas_stuart]

The album was called “rented world”

The situational iron is not lost.

Same thing happened to a number of Audible titles I have. My two biggest losses are “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” as read by Eric Idle, and “Wrinkle in Time” read by Madeline L’Engle.

[nodolra]

@thomdunn

I’m not idiot, so I do keep backups of my iTunes library. In fact, when I purchase songs from the iTunes Store (like I did with this Menzingers album), I convert them into WAVs and then manually re-upload them into my iTunes Match library, just to be triple-sure that I always have a good quality recording available.

What do you gain by doing this? It won’t even upload your WAV file, it’ll just match against the version already in the iTunes database and give you that. Backing up the AAC files somewhere other than in iTunes should be plenty, or if you really want to avoid proprietary codecs, reencode as FLAC or ALAC to save some space over WAV.

Keeping a backup is definitely a good idea. When I was reading up on iTunes Match, I found that all the Apple support articles about it go out of their way to warn you that it’s not a backup service, but just a convenience to keep your library synched across devices.

[LurkingGrue]

This is why I gave up on music locker services. I had previously used Google Music only to find the service getting more and more obnoxious always pushing the wrong music on searches. “Hey google, play Pink Floyd’s the Wall.” “I’m sorry that is only for google play subscribers … let me play you this random radio station… despite the fact you had uploaded that album to us”

I just stat down and fixed all my musics metadata using Music Brainz Picard and then set up a plex server and called it a day. Very happy so far.

[glowend]

Seems like Apple should aspire to the sentiment expressed by the song’s title.