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How Apple Music Can Disrupt Users' iTunes Libraries 360

An anonymous reader writes: Early adopters of Apple Music are warning others they could get more than they bargained for if they intend to download tracks for offline listening. Since Apple Music is primarily a streaming service, this functionality necessitates turning on iCloud Music for syncing purposes. The way Apple syncs files is to scan your library for known music files, and if it finds one, the service gives your account access to Apple's canonical copy. Unfortunately, this wipes out any custom edits you made to the file's metadata. For those who have put a lot of time into customizing their library, this can do a lot of damage to their organizational system. Apple's efforts to simplify and streamline the process have once again left advanced users with a difficult decision to make.
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How Apple Music Can Disrupt Users' iTunes Libraries

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  • Nowadays I just follow Spotify's, or Napter's, or Deezer's or Apple's. They do all the work for me already. For $9/month that's a lot of time that I save.

    • You're not OCD about your music library, a small minority (not including me!) are. And websites always need clickbait with headlines implying a world shaking problem that hits all users... so the problem gets blown out of proportion.

    • by slaker ( 53818 )

      For certain music genres, third party tags will be flatly incorrect even from an authoritative source. Classical music and Jazz need to use more tags than are typically supplied by download and streaming services and what tags are used are often applied incorrectly. Streaming and online stores ironically make more work for me than just ripping a goddamned CD and typing everything in myself.

      • The majority of tags from legit music I've bought have been incorrect.

        The most common problems are:

        1. Confusing composer with artist. If the song is a remix, the artist is the remixer. The original artist is the composer.

        2. Genres are fuzzy. Lots of songs fit into many genres. Picking a single genre is inaccurate at best. Sadly the id3 spec only lets us pick one, so I comma separate them out of protest. Wikipedia does this too. Look up an album, see many genres, not one.

        3. The infamous "Various Artists" art

        • by pjt33 ( 739471 )

          1. Confusing composer with artist. If the song is a remix, the artist is the remixer. The original artist is the composer.

          No, the original artist is the original artist (ID3v2.2 tag TOA, ID3v2.3 tag TOPE). They may also be the composer, but that is by no means certain.

          2. Genres are fuzzy. Lots of songs fit into many genres. Picking a single genre is inaccurate at best. Sadly the id3 spec only lets us pick one, so I comma separate them out of protest.

          No, the ID3v2.2 and ID3v2.3 specs let you select multiple

          • No, the original artist is the original artist (ID3v2.2 tag TOA, ID3v2.3 tag TOPE). They may also be the composer, but that is by no means certain.

            There is no "original artist" tag, AFAIK. What I'm referring to is the "artist" tag which properly should refer to whoever actually made the song. If it's a remix or a cover, the artist is whoever made the remix or the cover, not the author of the original song. The author of the original is the composer.

            No, ID3v2.2 and ID3v2.3 specify that multiple artists shoul

  • Apple = Buggy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by countach ( 534280 ) on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:18AM (#50047549)

    I'm not even using Apple Music and the update wiped out all the music on my iPhone. This was a long standing bug with IOS when the iPhone 6 came out, and I thought they'd finally nixed it a few months ago, but no now it's back. Meanwhile my iMac is at Apple for 10 days because of their failed 3TB iMac hardware, Argh, so I can't even synch it back on. Apple's quality has really dropped the last couple of years.

    • Re:Apple = Buggy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LVSlushdat ( 854194 ) on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:21AM (#50047559)

      Apple's quality has really dropped the last couple of years.

      Thank Tim Cook....

    • I'm not even using Apple Music and the update wiped out all the music on my iPhone.

      Didn't seem to effect millions of other people. Did it ever occur to you that maybe you made a mistake somewhere in the process? Lets assume its Apple's fault ... so one ... out of millions broke ... and if it happened to anyone else, would you still feel the same way? I doubt it.

      so I can't even synch it back on.

      ... And you weren't smart enough to have backups? Who's fault is that exactly? Your ID is lower than mine, that puts you in the 90s somewhere for signing up with slashdot ... and you still don't know to make backups? With tha

    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Complaining about a failed hard drive is hardly something worth attacking Apple for, especially since they're covering the replacements for free.

      The blame lies more with Seagate on those defective 3TB drives, IMO. They will fail the exact same way whether they get used in an iMac or a Windows PC.

  • You'd think Apple/Mac customers would be fairly comfortable with the flexibility vs simplicity trade-off by now?

  • You're all idiots (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:24AM (#50047569)

    So many stupid comments about how Apple users cannot be advanced users, including troll moderators that support such idiocy.

    Guess what, idiots? They're advanced users, not hackers/coders/programmers. Stop being elitist jerks and accept that there's people less knowledgeable than yourselves.

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:26AM (#50047575)
    For this reason and others.

    .
    I want to be the one in control of my music library. I do not want Apple, acting as a proxy for the media industry, taking inventory of the songs I have and changing the metadata for those songs.

    • Back in late '07/early '08 I bought an iPod. Dumped it about 6 month later because I could not get it to organize my music by album. An example of the problem is a soundtrack: 1 album with several different artists. iTunes insisted on grouping songs by artist and wouldn't let me group them by album.

      It's been a while and they may have fixed this, but I have no intention of every tying myself to iTunes ever again.
      • Have you tried clicking on the compilation checkbox?
      • People don't know how to use software and then complain that the software is buggy, news at 11.

        Hint: check the "compilation" box.

        • Does iTunes now have the capability to group songs by album in the directory structure?
          • Why does it matter how the files are organized? Let the OS and the software take care of technical details and manage your music through iTunes.

            • I have many players that just navigate directories. If I want to copy my music to one of these devices, I need to have each CD in a directory unless I want to make a playlist for every one.
              • I've said it above and I'll say it again:

                Select all the tracks for the album, "Get info". On the "details" page, there is a checkbox named "Compilation [_] Album is a compilation of songs by various artists". iTunes will then keep the files in a directory for the album (under /Compilations/AlbumName/).

      • by jo_ham ( 604554 )

        Did the really, really obvious "this is a compilation" checkbox that has always been there elude you?

        Not sure what Apple is meant to "fix" about that. I'd say "check the box for you automatically" but then we're in a story talking about how the sky is falling because the Music launch caused issues with non-desired editing of metadata.

        You can't win!

    • by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Yeah, I started ripping my own CDs to MP3 early on in the game and quickly realized that putting my collection in Apple's hands would not let me retain control of my collection. That was back in the days of the white iPod. I currently use git annex to keep my collection synchronized across two computers and my android phone. That mostly seems to work, although the android client does seem to be a bit flaky.
    • by Monoman ( 8745 )

      Unfortunately there is no Foobar 2000 for Mac. I tried a Mac for over a year and I could never find a suitable program for managing and playing my very large music library ... thousands of tracks in various audio file formats. Some programs couldn't deal with the number of files, some couldn't play all of the different audio formats. None could hold a candle to FB2K so I switched back.

      • by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        Not a mac user myself, but I use Quod Libet [readthedocs.org] on both Linux and Windows for my 621 album collection of FLACs, and there's a mac version as well. It's written in Python using GStreamer for the audio support, so I suppose file support depends on what GStreamer can play on your platform. I'm pretty happy with its tagging support, it will bulk-tag selected files and can move/rename files if you want, great for when the track database gave the ripper "Sound Track CD 1" and "OST Disc II" (musicbrainz is just as s

    • Or you could just not use the service that's been available for years already and you've not been using.

      What the summary is referring to is NOT iTunes Music, it is iTunes Match, which is not even a little new. iTunes Music includes iTunes Match for free.

      So why do you suddenly switch from iTunes because you don't like a service thats been out for years and you don't use, but just now discovered does something you don't like?

      $10 says you don't use iTunes anyway and are just trolling.

      Either way you're a douc

  • Think different! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Think different - as long as it is exactly as we tell you to.

  • by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Sunday July 05, 2015 @09:52AM (#50047823)
    Even more important than the music tags in my mind is the directory structure. I have many media devices that rely on // directory structure to have the music organized properly. I found it very distasteful that iTunes seems to put all the music in a big glob on the disk and expects you to use their UI to access it. So I'm not sure why this is news that they don't care about the tags, because they never cared about the structure on disk.
    • Stupid html formatting.. that should read: artist - subdir - recording - subdir - track
    • by thechink ( 182419 ) on Sunday July 05, 2015 @10:13AM (#50047905)

      There is an option in iTunes to leave the song files in their original location. I keep all my songs organized my way on a NAS and just point iTunes to it. The songs are not copied or moved to my Mac.

    • by jo_ham ( 604554 )

      You can do it that way if you like - you can tell iTunes to let you manage the directory structure how you like. This is the first time an automated feature has clashed with that option it seems (it won't change the directory structure, but it might affect things like custom start and end points set in id3 tags). It's not supposed to interfere if you set it to manual control so this is clearly unintended behaviour.

    • iTunes will leave the songs where they are OR will organize them into artist/album/song.ext for you if you choose. Those are two little checkboxes in the preferences, pretty sure the default is to move them into your iTunes library structure and organize them.

      You have to have a seriously messed up configuration before it just dumps them into the same directory. I have experienced what you're referring to but I also do a bunch of weird crap with an AFP on a FBSD box using a ZFS store for it all, so I have

  • And... (Score:2, Insightful)

    Not a single shit does Apple give. Now be a good iPhanboi and buy an Apple watch.

  • by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday July 05, 2015 @12:54PM (#50048455) Journal
    You're metadata-editing wrong.
  • by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Sunday July 05, 2015 @01:19PM (#50048511) Homepage Journal

    If it doesn't work as expected, or a change in feature set results in data loss or poor performance, it's because you're doing it wrong... much like when the iPhone 4 introduced the faulty easy-to-short antenna design when holding the phone the way anyone holds ANY cellphone, Jobs excuse was "you're holding it wrong." Therefore in this case, extending Apple reasoning to the current use case, if you're editing metadata, you're doing it wrong.

  • Google Music, in my experience, has the exact same problem Apple Music does. It ignores your manually input album art and other metadata, and decides to substitute what it thinks your tracks should have attached to them instead.

    The only good thing Google does that (so far), Apple doesn't is gives you a button to tell it the data is wrong for a given track so you can override it. (Still, that's a LOT of pointless extra work to put back what was there in the first place.) Well, that, and the fact they're not going to trash your "master library" of music since they don't act as the application all of your music is stored in. They just mess up the copies of the data they put up in the cloud for you to stream back down from your devices.

    I *wish* these cloud music services would simply ASK FIRST if you'd like to replace all of your existing metadata, or if you'd rather they only add metadata to your tracks that don't yet contain any at all.

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire

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