At some point, enough is enough. That time has come for me – Apple Music is just too much of a hassle to be bothered with. Nobody I’ve spoken at Apple or outside the company has any idea how to fix it, so the chances of a positive outcome seem slim to none.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, Apple Music gave me one more kick in the head. Over the weekend, I turned off Apple Music and it took large chunks of my purchased music with it. Sadly, many of the songs were added from CDs years ago that I no longer have access to. Looking at my old iTunes Match library, before Apple Music, I’m missing about 4,700 songs. At this point, I just don’t care anymore, I just want Apple Music off my devices.
I trusted my data to Apple and they failed. I also failed by not backing up my library before installing Apple Music. I will not make either of those mistakes again.
Wait, you mean entrusting your data blindly to a company without managing your own local backup is a bad idea? I am so surprised.
The cloud should never be your only storage medium. It should be an additional storage medium. How on earth do supposedly tech savvy people make such a stupid mistake?
Maybe I’m missing something, but someone who “loves Apple “because they take difficult problems and come up with innovative, simple solutions.” doesn’t seem like a technically competent person to me.
Also, to normal consumers, the ‘cloud’ is sold to them as being the end all need for all storage. Personally I try to keep my shit out of the cloud as much as I possibly can. At least if I lose my own shit I only have myself to blame, rather than some nebulous company that can just say ‘oops’.
WTF?! A lot of technically competent persons love Apple products for that reason…
Edited 2015-07-22 20:22 UTC
… yes, and “technically competent” in this case means “versed in the operation of Apple, Inc. products” …
An ENORMOUS amount of software developers, computer engineers, unix administrators, ecc use Macbooks and other Apple products because they are simple and beautiful.
Are We all stupid and technical incompetent??
I did not say anything about stupid.
The act of losing important data may be an indicator of technical competence. The original author at least admits partial fault, which is progress. Learn from mistakes. Next step, learn to use other systems. An outside perspective helps one understand the hidden complexities of systems with simple interfaces.
I think the political correct term is that: “You think different”
The meaning of “technically competent” has deeply changed in the last ~10 years. Also, the people who call themselves such are very different these days, mostly in the ways they get “hurt” when someone tries to explain them what it should mean.
You realize he was responding to someone who basically said that the appreciation of Apple products indicates technical incompetence. In other words “Apple users are stupid”.
I do not understand what your post means in that context…
If you “lose your own shit” you only have yourself to blame – it really has nothing to do with whether or not you use a cloud service when it happens.
The same way otherwise smart people don’t make data backups at all: “It won’t happen to me.” and “Well… tomorrow, I need to do something about that e’mail from France first…”
(Denial and laziness.)
My favourite: “I have a Raid, why do I need backup?” Coworker lost all his data (family pictures from 15 years ago etc.) because of this.
> The cloud should never be your only storage medium. It should be an additional storage medium. How on earth do supposedly tech savvy people make such a stupid mistake?
For most people, the medium they’d be “backing up to” is an often-manhandled external USB HDD, often the cheapest one they can find at that capacity. I’ve worked with servers too long to *ever* trust anything on non-redundant storage except possibly tape backups, let alone bargain basement external media.
Edited 2015-07-22 21:31 UTC
Exactly. Instead of saying have a local copy, perhaps Thom should say what we’ve always said for back up purposes: Have two copies stored on different enough media in physically different places and test them periodically.
That could be local + cloud. That could be cloud provider A & cloud provider B. That could be Local HD & cold spare from a different manufacturer.
This is like slipping into a comfortable dictatorship. It’s great to have things taken care of for you. Comfort makes you oblivious to the power trade. Next thing you know, they’re bashing down your door. Or arresting you because you made them feel bad.
Power is important. The cloud should be a backup to your own personal server. This is the open future, IF the open future wins…
From the article:
How much you want to bet that he sold all those CDs to a music shop after ripping them?
If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have had those MP3s anyways.
If he legitimately lost them, though, then that sucks, but I somehow doubt that is the case…
I don’t doubt it – I lose something EVERY SINGLE TIME I MOVE. I lost about one third of my CDs the last time I moved. God knows what happened to them – I packed them on one end, and when I unpacked, they were gone. The time before that I lost two thirds of my VHS tapes. The time before that was more than half my books. That’s why I backup everything I purchase now on multiple drives that are never packed together. I ain’t gonna lose anything more! Well, I will, but at least I’ll have backups.
There is no the only way to lose discs, I have a friend that lost all of his collection with more than 4000 discs between CDs, DVD and BlueRay due to a fire. Also how many discs where lost due to natural disasters (Katrina).
Edited 2015-07-22 22:40 UTC
Yeah, and you can “lose” half your stuff to your ex. All sorts of ways to wind up no longer having access to CDs you legally bought years back. My dad lost one when his dog decided it was a chew-toy. According to the RIAA/MPAA, we should just repurchase these things every time something happens.
I was very upset about one thing I lost in my last move: A die photo of the first chip I designed.
Some time in the past few years, I lost a rather large CD case chock full of a wide variety of punk rock, so I’ve been there, too. I wasn’t even in the process of moving, either. Not sure what happened to it
I still somehow doubt that’s what happened. I’m not sure why… it might have been his phrasing (“I no longer have access to”, rather than something indicating loss).
“If he legitimately lost them, though, then that sucks, but I somehow doubt that is the case.”
I don’t know about his situation, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that disks actually die (i.e., become unplayable) over time.
I’ve been re-ripping my 500 or so CD’s to lossless flac and a solid 10% of them won’t read, or won’t read enough to get a solid rip.
I was probably about average on the scale of taking care of them – some got loose in the car or got stacked and slid around a little bit. But some have no visible damage and are still having trouble reading.
Optical discs are not the bulletproof media they were sold as. I have seen brand new CD-R’s fail after being stored in a book for a year. Since it’s a piece of tin foil holding digital data it’s hit or miss if it will read. Overall reliability of CD’s is good but not great. I find vinyl outlasting CD’s easily, although vinyl gets to stay put whereas CD’s get thrown all over the place.
I’ve got a 20 year old Bad Religion CD that still plays.
Though, not everybody takes care of their music as well as I do, of course.
When will people realize that Apple is a terrible company?
I don’t use Apple Music. It doesn’t integrate with Sonos so it’s sort of unusable to me. I totally believe it’s buggy though – I remember Spotify in the early days
That said, this person claims they used music match ( which Apple Music subsumed ) so he didn’t actually rip any of the CD’s. When he canceled Apple Music he effectively cancelled music match which will then remove all the music match music; that’s how it has always worked.
So.. I dated this bird a ‘few’ years ago. She loved some of my music (Yeah..I know it’s a trap etc..) and when she was over she jumped onto the local network with her mac, mounted the smb:// share and pointed her iTunes at it whilst studying.
Next day, I notice that my music dir is empty.
So, smb share was re-made to be read-only, and my music restored from last week’s tape.
Trust you NAUGHT A BIT apple! iTunes can go fornicate elsewhere.
Trusting `the cloud`, and companies who offer the service is like trusting a teenager to watch your house while you go on vacation. Even if there isn’t any blatantly obvious damage when you return, you can be sure the place isn’t the same as you left it. At a very minimum you know they snooped through your stuff.
Real clouds are not permanent so why should digital ones be any different?
I have been a public cloud service doubter for years and remain solidly so. This is for those services that are ‘off premises’. On premise clouds are different. You aren’t giving control of your data to some third party.
As for streaming music services? I’d rather wash my mouth out with soap. I use an iPhone and a MacBook so in some peoples eyes I’m a fanboi. Ok but I’ll never sign up to Apple Music. I’ve never paid for any stuff from the App Store.
Early adopters beware! Apple is no different in this respect to just about every company in the world.
I also want to re-iterate that, since I also think it’s very important: never ever trust all your data to any third party company-hosted cloud service. Never. Do not do it. There.
Funny (not so much) thing is, some “younger” (i.e., 5-7 years only) peers look at me like a martian alien when I say stuff like that. Even some of the more tech savvy ones. Well, I no longer care, but I do care for the protection of my data. Upside, I never had to curse at anyone for losing my music or whatever.
Apple hasn’t for a number of years been able to manage a robust and reliable cloud, .Mac was ok, but from mobileme onwards the problems they have are amazing.
They cant even get something simple like spam protection working on mail, i still get stupid spam which every other vendor would easily block.
Bad convenience + Bad quality…doesn’t sound like a winner to me
Apple either needs to move back out of music (they won’t unless they spin off beats) or up the quality of their offerings. Actual quality, not imagined quality or convenience.
People can beat up Apple Inc. but their products are still used all over the production world. It’s a shame that people create, mix, and deliver high-quality music from Apple machines but Apple inc. will only sell and stream 10% versions.
If they refuse to stream full versions because of bandwidth concerns then full versions at minimum should be for sale.
To think that they stream you 10% files then expect you to buy the same compromised product makes no sense to me. Maybe in 2004 it did, but now?
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