I’ve had that experience too. Right now I have songs that I have played many times, on my Mac, which no longer are playable. I don’t know how that happened. I’ve had iTunes remove my stars once (so far not on Catalina’s Music app (I wish it didn’t have the same name as IOS’s Music app)).
It’s not as buggy as the podcast app, which isn’t as buggy as podcasts used to be on iTunes on my Mac.
Two’s a crowd on my cloud.
That sounds intriguing.
A quick search and visit to their website lead to confusion.
Can you put that in non-enthusiast language and explain why it was a good choice for you?
Storing music as digital files is not the same thing as relying on someone else to store it for you.
If you are happy to have your music collection solely in the form of perishable, easy-to-lose physical media, then a music locker service – even with this kind of issue – might well be more reliable in the long term.
The single most reliable way to store a music collection is to store it on a hard drive, and keep it backed up to whatever degree of safety you want. Though it’s worth noting that a lot of people latch onto the first part and only later find out how critical the second part is.
It’s mostly psychological. People accept without question that they’ll sometimes play a CD and find out it doesn’t work or the disc is missing. But the idea that an album could be yoinked due to a bug or copyright fuckery makes us quake with rage, even if it’s statistically less likely. Even when someone loses their whole music collection on a stolen hard disk, that sort of person probably still won’t think “I should have stored it in the cloud”. Because in the end, they value the sense of being in control more than they worry about having to buy all their music again.
I know people who are proud of music they have collected on physical media, and I know people (especially younger people) who take for granted that they can listen to anything whenever they want, and find it odd to care about “having” music. Empirically, both approaches work absolutely fine (and neither would have much mileage following a zombie apocalypse); it’s purely an esthetic choice.
That’s exactly why I do use the service – because my pocket thingy doesn’t have the capacity for my library. @thomdunn explains the benefit pretty well in the article. Sure, the upload took a while, but so what? The time to do it is a one-time cost. (These days it would take a lot less time; ~40 GB ain’t that intimidating at 100 Mbps much less 1 Gbps.)
But I keep local copies, oh yes I do.
Yep, but my approach is a little different: rather than having my home library available to any device, anywhere, I prefer to have it on a single small device that I can take anywhere. To wit: I maintain a second library which is a lossy-compressed version of my flacs, 75% of which will fit on a 256 Gb micro-SD that I’ve stuck in a Sandisk mp3 player running Rockbox. I’ve never seen the “available anywhere” model to have any advantage over the “take anywhere” model. Quite the opposite, in fact. Of course, YMMV.
A DAC is a Digital to Analog Converter, and it converts the stored audio data to sound. The particular model I use produces a much higher-quality output than the on-board 3.5 mm jack on the Pi, which can be a little noisy. The HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro further has its own separate low jitter clock that it it uses to time the conversion, rather than the Pi’s on-board clock. Theoretically, this can produce a more accurate output, but in practice I doubt that it’s detectable. This model wasn’t significantly more expensive than the lower-end model, though, so I went ahead and bought it. The upshot is that I have a complete high-quality audio jukebox for under $100, not including the hard drive.
In the last 30 years, the number of commercially made audio cds I’ve had fail is zero. some of it has been ripped to disk. I don’t poo-poo the idea of making your own backups. But expecting some cloud service to always be there is plainly foolish.
I don’t think it’s clearly foolish, or not clearly more so than assuming a CD collection is invulnerable (and I have had printed CDs fail for no discernible reason, albeit more often from scratches or misplacement).
If you think of Apple Music as “a way to store my music collection”, it’s debatable whether it’s a more reliable way. But more to the point, that’s not what it is; it doesn’t primarily store your music, it gives you access to music in general. If Apple goes bankrupt, you can pay Amazon or Google for the same service. The only thing at (mild) risk is your playlists.
I’m not pitching these services, and I don’t use them. I keep “my” music on my own SSDs, and I have stuff on vinyl. But that’s not to do with me being dumb or smart, it’s just a lifestyle choice.
Microsoft did something like this with my books.
Another fine solution for Raspberry Pi audio is a high-quality USB audio interface. Of course, the downside there is that it can cost several times more than the Pi itself, so it’s really only worthwhile if you have such a box gathering dust.
It’s pretty darned simple: Apple does not now, nor has it ever given a fig about it’s customers. They’re just a resource to be milked, milked, and milked some more. If you’re foolish enough to trust your back-ups to them then you deserve to lose them.
LOL you complain that you gave cash to apple and the screwed you, come off it, its apple, thats what they do, only an idiot has an iphone, ever one else has android phone that you know you can use and do what you want to not the other way round!
Sorry - this is absolutely not directed at the OP, who acknowledged it was “inevitable” - but I can’t help thinking of that “Leopards Eating People’s Faces” thing…
My own love of Apple came to an abrupt halt in 1984, I’m afraid. I saw the contrast between the Apple II series and the Mac, and decide that the Mac wasn’t even close to what I wanted.
Going Mac means your software investment may be toast with the next MacOS revision (as what happened with the 64-bit-only switch). Not to mention it’s been through three different CPU architectures (68000, PowerPC, x86) and could conceivably switch to ARM at some point.
I’m no fan of Windows (especially Windows greater than 7), but I’ll give Microsoft credit for giving backward compatibility some thought. A 32-bit version of Windows can still directly run MS-DOS applications - handy if you have some old engineering calculation programs from back in the day that you use in your daily business, or use Lotus Agenda, which nobody has successfully replaced. I know of a couple of people with such situations.
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