Apple iTunes 12.4 / Screenshot Credit: Amit Chowdhry
Apple Music, the music streaming service built into the Music iOS/Android app and iTunes for Macs/Windows, has been widely criticized for the way it handles local music files. Last year, Jim Dalrymple of The Loop detailed an Apple Music problem that caused 4,700 of his songs to be removed from his library. Dalrymple communicated with Apple’s engineers directly to have his music restored.
More recently, an artist named James Pinkstone said that 122GB of music files went missing from his laptop. “What Amber (an Apple employee) explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted,” said Pinkstone in a blog post two weeks ago. “If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.”
When that blog post went viral, an Apple representative reached out to Pinkstone. And then Apple sent two representatives to Pinkstone’s home to try and recreate the error that caused him to lose 122GB of music. What makes the bug even more strange is that most of his music files disappeared, but not all of them.
“In an extremely small number of cases users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission,” said Apple in a statement before iTunes 12.4 was released. “We’re taking these reports seriously as we know how important music is to our customers and our teams are focused on identifying the cause. We have not been able to reproduce this issue, however, we’re releasing an update to iTunes early next week which includes additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue they should contact AppleCare.”
It is unclear what the "safeguards" are because Apple did not address the music deletion bug in the iTunes 12.4 changelog notes:
But an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch that iTunes 12.4 aims to fix the music deletion problem. If you have been affected by the bug that causes your music, videos or other content to disappear, then you should visit Apple’s support page about it. Next month, Apple is expected to announce a revamped version of Apple Music.
The biggest shortcoming when it comes to Apple Music is that iTunes makes it extremely difficult to sync locally stored music and iCloud Music on an iOS device at the same time. Sometimes you want to listen to songs on iCloud and then switch over to locally stored MP3s. For example, iTunes makes it difficult for me to sync the DJ mixes in the form of MP3s I downloaded from SoundCloud and iCloud Music songs at the same time.
Another major iCloud Music problem is the dialog box that appears when you delete one of your locally stored songs from the Music library of iTunes. “This will delete this song from your iCloud Music Library and from your other devices. To keep this song in your library and on your other devices, you can remove this download instead,” says the dialog box.
This dialog box comes off as confusing because there isn’t a simple explanation on the differences between “Remove Download” or “Delete Songs.” Selecting “Remove File” removes the file from your hard disk space without moving it to the Trash. And clicking “Delete Songs” removes the song from your music library and moves the downloaded file to the Trash.
The speed of iTunes has also substantially improved in version 12.4. Reddit user darth-vayda said iTunes 12.4 opened in only 30 seconds on her 2012 MacBook Pro compared to three minutes in the past. However, the speed improvements reportedly applies to Macs rather than Windows. Windows users said that iTunes 12.4 performance has not really changed.
What are your thoughts about the iTunes 12.4 update? Have you been affected by songs being removed due to iCloud Music? Leave a comment with your thoughts!
