Apple Says It Doesn't Know Why iTunes Users Are Losing Their Music Files (theverge.com) 214
Earlier this month, an Apple Music user James Pinkstone claimed that the online music streaming service deleted 122GB of music from his library for no apparent reason. Several Slashdot readers noted they had also faced a similar issue or knew someone who had. The iPhone maker has now acknowledged a bug in iTunes that is apparently causing the glitch, however, it adds that it doesn't really know why "some" users are facing this issue. The Verge reports: The company confirmed that "in an extremely small number of cases, users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission." However, Apple was unable to reproduce the bug, indicating it doesn't really know what's going on here. The company adds: 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.
Seriously incompetent (Score:5, Insightful)
They're really claiming that they don't know why this is happening?
Note to iTunes software engineers: grep through your code and find all calls to delete(). Investigate the code in those areas. If you can't add some basic debug code - or if you're unsure of what "grep" is - maybe you should consider a move to management.
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This assumes that there is a single person with access to all the source code. It wouldn't surprise me if the various parts of iTunes were written by independent teams with no access to each others code, intended to prevent an employee from stealing the source code and selling it to a competitor.
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Erm, do you develop software?
Soirce code is hold in a source code management system/versioning system.
Onviously for single apps all developers have access to all code. Everything else is not realy imaginable.
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You've never linked against a library where you had only headers and a binary?
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I did ... in the stone age of software development, or rather in the copper age when we used windows. ...
Before windows and after windows I usually have all sources. I work mainly with Java anyway in our times
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Sure. But not for software written by the company I work for.
I can believe that different departments at Apple don't get access to new software that hasn't been announced yet. Apple likes their secrets. But long established software like iTunes, no chance. Of course developers on the iTunes team have access to all the source for the app.
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No, I just know enough to realize that it's not so unlikely for one team to not know what the other is doing, sufficient flexibility of thought to consider the possibility of a paranoid management, and the reading ability to know that the claim I was refuting was that only someone who hasn't programmed would think it is possible for one team to not be able to see what the other team wrote.
Are you claiming you haven't even linked against libraries from a proprietary compiler before?
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Erm, do you develop software?
Soirce code is hold in a source code management system/versioning system.
Onviously for single apps all developers have access to all code. Everything else is not realy imaginable.
Given the complex frankenstein-style monstrosity that is iTunes, I would not be surprised to find out that there are a couple different teams and that the iTunes store guys simply do not spend time looking at the video playback code.
There'd definitely be an engineer who could bring it all together, and search the entire codebase, tho.
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This assumes that there is a single person with access to all the source code. It wouldn't surprise me if the various parts of iTunes were written by independent teams with no access to each others code, intended to prevent an employee from stealing the source code and selling it to a competitor.
God, I thought nobody could be so clueless about software development, and about copyright law.
If you were an Apple employee and tried to sell the iTunes source code lets say to Microsoft, they would call their lawyer, who would call Apple's lawyers and the police, and you would go into the history books as one of the most stupid criminals ever.
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If you were an Apple employee and tried to sell the iTunes source code lets say to Microsoft, they would call their lawyer, who would call Apple's lawyers and the police, and you would go into the history books as one of the most stupid criminals ever.
And if you were a Chinese hacker who got into that single account which has access to the entirety of the iTunes source code... nothing bad would happen to you. You might even get a bonus, or promoted.
Not everybody plays by the rules.
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I had a chinese developer once try to sell me the code for a competitors software he had worked on. I phoned the competitor. Next day the coder was raided by the police in bejing.
I try not to think about the poor bastards life after that. Justice can be brutal over there.
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That would explain a lot, especially the Windows build.
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Indeed, I read the title as, Apple admits it is totally incompetent at software programming. This'll probably get modded down by apple fanboys.
Re:Seriously incompetent (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that this got modded +5 on Slashdot is a clear sign people here have no clue what the fuck they're talking about anymore. Anyone who has ever worked on any complex software is aware that unusual sets of rare circumstances can result in unforeseen behavior and the solution is rarely as easy as "grep for problem."
I've no doubt iTunes devs know exactly where all the file-deletion calls are, and all of them are legitimately necessary. The question is, what secondary functions call those, and what tertiary functions call those secondary functions, etc. on down the rabbit hole; what assertions and double-checks are used to ensure only the appropriate files are removed; what is the entire set of circumstances that results in a delete when there shouldn't be one? The answer absolutely is not going to be found right at the site of the delete call.
To hazard a guess: iTunes has various methods by which it caches music downloaded from a user's online library, or from Apple Music. These files might be stored locally permanently (the user can specifically request to locally cache stuff so it's available w/o internet access or if they want to make permanent copies of items in their online library) or temporarily (when the user simply chooses to play a song or playlist from the cloud). There are also local files that may exist in the user's online library, but are the user's actual original source files. So some of these items iTunes can (and should) safely delete under various circumstances, while others should not - if I had to bet, some unusual set of circumstances results in iTunes incorrectly seeing files that should be permanent as temporary, resulting in their deletion. Control-F "delete" doesn't do shit to help find the source of that sort of problem.
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iTunes hasn't been a "desktop media player" for over a decade. Sure, it plays music and movies, but it's also a library (Database), a store (internet browser), a device manager (to include mounting, disk/memory management & reformatting, and device OS management), a tag editor, a cd/dvd authoring suite, online radio streaming, etc. The install file is actually five or six different programs, one of which is a networking protocol.
iTunes is more like a whole OS running in a VM than a desktop media player.
Cool I have one of those terrific "whole OS running in a VM" things too on my computer. It's a file browser, a software development platform, a configuration file tweaking utility, a temporary clipboard storage extension, a movie subtitles editor, a formatted data sanitizer, and it can be used to write theatre plays and rap lyrics as well! It's called notepad.exe
Re: Seriously incompetent (Score:3)
And that's exactly what Apple will be doing. Since Apple cannot reproduce the issue, and has no real idea if it ever occurs, is a user error, or is a bug, they basically have one option:
Go through all the code that uses FSDeleteObject(), FSUnlinkObject(), and unlink() (The function calls iTunes actually makes) and either replace them with calls to FSMoveObject() or fortify the code with additional error checking they can't confirm will help.
The issue is, under no circumstances is iTunes supposed to delete m
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You meant unlink() right?
Probably FSDelete :-(. Although it should rely be removeItemAtURL:
standard corporate bullshit answer #3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like they didnt know why 'some of users laptops GPU died' for almost 4 years before admitting fault and reluctantly being forced to a recall.
"Small number of cases" (Score:2)
Apple admitted ?!?! (Score:2)
When you take into account Apples tendency to pretend there are never any issues, and silence everyone who tries to talk about them, and when they finally do say anything they downplay it to the extreme, this immediately makes me think it's a HUGE problem they can't suppress simply because they admitted it happens and there were actual users that got nailed.
(Is that an award length run on sentence, or does it not even qualify?)
Personally
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ITunes installing shovelware? You must have been using some seriously compromised sources. Apple simply admitted they have had some complaints but can't reproduce the issue. This is equally as likely a bug in the underlying hardware or operating system than an iTunes bug or maybe even user incompetence (corrupt library files doesn't mean the data actually disappears).
Incompetent? (Score:2)
If they really don't know, then they've got to be incompetent. It's not enough to say what they are incompetent at, but at least at quality control.
Of course, they could be lying about not knowing, or the spokesman could be kept intentionally ignorant.
i've been there.... (Score:5, Informative)
i've never really used apple products, but my wife does the macbook iphone thing. we've had two experiences with it randomly deleting her shit.
first time (this was about a year ago, not sure what itunes version):
she got a new iphone, all was well. we wiped the old iphone. one day she dug up her old iphone, and decided to start using it to play music in her car. plugged it into the macbook.
itunes asked if she'd like to sync with the new device. she said yes. it deleted all of the music on her computer, including physical files.
plugged her new phone in, it acted as if it had never seen it before, and asked if she'd like to sync. it then deleted all of the music on her new phone as well.
second time:
she'd been using iphoto to organize all of her pictures (many thousands of them)
fired up iphoto one morning, and all of her shit was gone, it was like she'd never used iphoto in the first place.
no sign of the monolithic 'iphoto store' file, or anything. no original pictures. gone.
there are two things my wife loves, pictures and music, and it systematically fucked her entire collection without warning. unfortunately many of these items had not been backed up. these are just my observations, i don't know why it would do these things, and i don't care. i no longer trust that peice of shit operating system or any of its devices, and i use incremental backups of her entire laptop using rsync now (not time machine, i don't trust it either)
Re: i've been there.... (Score:4, Informative)
itunes asked if she'd like to sync with the new device. she said yes. it deleted all of the music on her computer, including physical files
This did not occur. iTunes does not permit an iOS device to become the "master device" for songs. It will only copy songs to the iOS device (except for purchased songs, which it copies to the existing iTunes library). It's actually a very common complaint that iTunes won't copy all songs off an iOS device.
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Probably not. Welcome to the new phenomena of what I call "lazy caps": all lower case-often with an occasional word written with a capital letter just to prove that their keyboard is indeed working.
And not, it's not mobile device text entry: if anything, those thing auto-capitalize the beginning of sentences, at least. No, it's the I-can-touch-type-faster-then-I-think-stream-of-conscious-keyboard-diarrhoea-using-my-pinky-fingers-slows-me-down-fuck-I-gotta-do-this-quickly-someone-is-WRONG-on-the-internet [xkcd.com] f
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Glad I never trusted it (Score:2)
Plex (Score:3)
Switched to plex and never looked back. Works streamed to your cell, and then on to a bt stereo in the car also. Joy. Ripping though, I still use itunes, and then move the media to the plex server.
H.
Happened to me (Score:2)
I had about 62GB in my music library. iTunes (which i only use to sync music on my iPod) deleted everything except the 10GB or so that was purchased on Apple store. .
I had a huge vinyl/cd collection to start with; when I liked an artist I used to buy the entire discography. So I grew my digital library and saw it as my own private Spotify. Put it on random and it's like a commercial-free radio that will never play Kanye West or Celine Dion.
I have a backup on Glacier and could re-rip stuff if I really wanted
iTunes deleted years of podcasts on me... (Score:2)
Re: Digital hoarders (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Digital hoarders (Score:5, Insightful)
iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.
Re: Digital hoarders (Score:3, Informative)
He probably didn't. iTunes scans your computer for music files and automatically "adds" them to your iTunes library. And then deletes them for you when it "makes them available from Apple Music."
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He probably didn't. iTunes scans your computer for music files and automatically "adds" them to your iTunes library. And then deletes them for you when it "makes them available from Apple Music."
Except it doesn't move them to the iTunes library - it copies them. So unless you delete the originals yourself, you've got another copy of the file... but I can imagine a lot of people would do exactly that, because why would you want two copies on your computer?
I am not really sure how much I agree or disagree with the gp post. People do need to take some responsibility, and we tech-heads know better than most what can go wrong with tech. But most people aren't like us; and all of these companies sell the
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No iTunes actually deletes the files. If you want them again you are supposed to redownload them from apple music. But it will also "match" your song to its internal database, and if there is a match then the file doesn't even make it to the cloud, they just serve you the version they have. On top of it, if you stop paying for apple music, you loose access to the files you stored in the cloud.
But, iTunes Match is a completely Opt-In service. Not that losing ones' data is ever cool...
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One of the links leads to a story where a guy complains about Apple Music (not mere iTunes). When you subscribe, they actually remove files from your machine and store them in "their cloud", playing you back whichever song they deem a match for your file. And you lose it all when you stop paying.
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com... [vellumatlanta.com]
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One of the links leads to a story where a guy complains about Apple Music (not mere iTunes). When you subscribe, they actually remove files from your machine and store them in "their cloud", playing you back whichever song they deem a match for your file. And you lose it all when you stop paying.
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com... [vellumatlanta.com]
This is fast becoming an urban legend. But it just isn't true. Neither iTunes Music nor iTunes Match (two entirely separate services) delete ANYTHING from your computer/iPhone/iPad.
I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.
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I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.
I don't know what is iTunes Music. Is that a made up product that fanbois use to defend Apple when it's clear to everyone else that Apple did (again) a terrible job with one of their actual products?
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No iTunes actually deletes the files.
My post, and the one to which I was responding, was referring to iTunes ability to search your local computer and add music files to its library on the device. That's a completely different thing than what you're referring to... and it copies rather than moves/deletes the originals.
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iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.
I suspect he had iTunes to listen to shit he bought, and pro-grade software to deal with his own compositions, but a) as a composer the amount of songs he has to buy is probably several orders of magnitude greater then that of a sane person, and b) it's not unlikely iTunes found his work stash all by itself, and then when he clicked the wrong dialogue on the "cleaning space" screen it decided "why does he need 6 separate versions of this one song we have on the iTunes cloud" and deleted his originals.
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iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.
I suspect he had iTunes to listen to shit he bought, and pro-grade software to deal with his own compositions, but a) as a composer the amount of songs he has to buy is probably several orders of magnitude greater then that of a sane person, and b) it's not unlikely iTunes found his work stash all by itself, and then when he clicked the wrong dialogue on the "cleaning space" screen it decided "why does he need 6 separate versions of this one song we have on the iTunes cloud" and deleted his originals.
While your comments are kind of off-mark, it did make me think of the "De-Duplication" feature in iTunes. The user has to invoke it manually; but I could see someone doing that without thinking it through, and trashing large sections of their iTunes Library.
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iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions
That's an understatement. It's the Nero Burning ROM equivalent [0] from Apple, this vast bloated mass of crap hacked over and over with every imaginable feature ever dreamed up by every marketing manager ever thrown in and partially implemented by different developers without any coherent plan or interface.
[0] According to the Nero web site, Nero Burning Dumpster requires 5GB of disk space to install. 5 fucking gigabytes to burn a CD. I don't know what CDBurnerXP requires for install but the download is
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I'll have you know I could listen to my collection in only about 4.5 years. Assuming I never slept.
If I fed different streams to each ear and had my corpus callosum severed I could get through it in just over 2.
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i don't care about your corpus callosum. maybe you should take better care of it?
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I'll have you know I could listen to my collection in only about 4.5 years. Assuming I never slept.
If I fed different streams to each ear and had my corpus callosum severed I could get through it in just over 2.
You don't see a correct Corpus Callosum reference everyday. Kudos!
Re:Digital hoarders (Score:5, Informative)
Based on the contents of my 24/96 FLAC folder it averages about 1.2GB/hour. Getting into the hundreds of GB is very doable.
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tl;dr; its not about hearing, its about working with DAC chipsets, spdif and i2s inputs, and also brickwall filtering and post DAC i/v stages.
you are somewhat right, but you don't know everything...
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Ok, even when doing that, there's still no use for going above 44khz. 24-bit? Maybe, but only if you're doing some serious editing/mixing and want to eliminate sound artifacts (i.e. pops) from the final copy.
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read further, young padawan.
there's more to it.
lots of bad hype and bad info; and that confuses the issue. but once you remove the bad info, the good info does make sense.
i2s, spdif, receiver chips, dac chips, file processing and DSP on the files.
if I'm going to 'do things' to photo files, I do it at raw and full bit depth. well, audio is becoming like that and even vol control is a dsp math operation. you want high bit depth for doing math on files.
what I agree with you on is: at the final stage, you CO
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I don't think anything I said conflicts with any of that. Go to your comment 'volume control is a DSP math operation' for example: Consider if your source started at a low bit rate but you needed to i.e. increase the volume. What do you get? Basically a lot of noise that sounds like static, kind of like 80's era cassette tapes when played at higher volume. Hence using a higher bit rate makes sense for that application.
But again as I stated, higher sample rate (NOT bit rate, these are two different things) i
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any application
Unless you're a DJ. After shifting that track an octave and a half down and slowing that other track down about 50 bpm or so to match, you're really going to wish you had those extra samples. This is an exercise you can do on your own with free software like Audacity. Get a piece of music. Two exercises. 1.) Lower its pitch without affecting its tempo by at least an octave. 2.) Lower its tempo without affecting its pitch by at least 30 bpm. Both of these exercises should give you a hint what will hap
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Unless you're a DJ. After shifting that track an octave and a half down and slowing that other track down about 50 bpm or so to match, you're really going to wish you had those extra samples. This is an exercise you can do on your own with free software like Audacity. Get a piece of music. Two exercises. 1.) Lower its pitch without affecting its tempo by at least an octave. 2.) Lower its tempo without affecting its pitch by at least 30 bpm. Both of these exercises should give you a hint what will happen if lower by more. It will sound like shit. You will quickly see that those extra samples you think are only for "audiophiles" really do come in handy.
No, this really won't work the way you think it will. It might make sounds that otherwise have a higher frequency come to within your audible spectrum, however anything that was already in your audible spectrum is inevitably going to sound different. This only has scientific applications, and is otherwise worthless for a DJ.
This all comes down to how fourier transforms work, by the way, which are the basis behind the Nyquist theorem. It's also analogous to making ultra-violet light visible to human eyes.
Now, what's truly confusing to me about your posts is that you seem to believe that you need more than 16 bits to adjust volume. If boosting the volume on something with 16 bits makes it sound a worn cassette that's a recording of a recording of a recording, what you're running into is compression.
Tha
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one more bit of info that you have obviously not thought about. maybe this will be of general interest to geeks.
some hardware can't accept higher samplerates. I have a crossover that 'stops' at 96k via its spdif-in. this is not uncommon.
some audio files are being released in 176k and 192k and even other stuff, dsd being one. I need to re-code such files if I am to send them digitally to my playback system.
having the CONSUMER files (not masters, but stuff you and I get) be as high res as possible, in bot
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Actually, there is a very good reason. Anything above half the sample frequency will create aliases in the hearable range. To prevent that, you must use a low-pass filter to remove those higher frequencies but low pass filters are not perfect. They begin cutting before their set frequency. You can use multiple low pass filters, but then you introduce other distortions. Keep in mind, these are analog filters.
So high quality gear is sensitive well into the ultrasonic and uses a cutoff high enough that they be
Re:Digital hoarders (Score:5, Informative)
Actually 96 kHz makes sense in a mixing setting too if you're altering the pitch of a recording like autotune, then you're effectively stretching/compressing the samples causing interpolation errors in the time domain not just the amplitude. But yes for a final mix 48kHz/44.1kHz is enough, though since both systems are in use another advantage is that you can get perfect sound both for a 44.1 kHz CD and a 48 kHz soundtrack for a movie while a conversion between them would be slightly lossy. But to audiophiles "studio grade" has become a thing like "military grade" is to crypto.
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Here's the thing: In modern music production, there's a lot of processing that goes on in the box, and outside the realm of human hearing. Working at higher resolutions and bitrates that are outside the spectrum of human hearing c
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There's really no point in 96khz ever. You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture. Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's, which means that extra information is effectively just wasted space. 24 bits per sample is also a waste unless you work in a studio type environment and are working with a master copy that you intend on mixing, however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.
You're wrong. And 16 bits is an even worse restriction.
There's this thing called "aliasing". You might want to look into it.
The devil is literally in the details, or lack thereof, in under-sampled signals. Listen to some music with some percussion instruments like Triangle, Bells, Tambourine, or some Cymbal-Types. I have gotten really sick and tired of 44/16 music with cymbals that sound like escaping steam, and tambourines with aliased "undertones" down into the upper-BASS regions.
That's why I buy m
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That's why you'll want 24-bit for a studio master, because it gives you more room to adjust the individual samples and splice audio streams without hearing any kind of pop or static when it's re-sampled back to 16-bit. However going above 44khz still remains pointless, even for that purpose.
Here's Nyquist sampling theorem 101:
Strictly speaking, the theorem only applies to a class of mathematical functions having a Fourier transform that is zero outside of a finite region of frequencies. Intuitively we expect that when one reduces a continuous function to a discrete sequence and interpolates back to a continuous function, the fidelity of the result depends on the density (or sample rate) of the original samples. The sampling theorem introduces the concept of a sample rate that is sufficient for perfect fidelity for the class of functions that are bandlimited to a given bandwidth, such that no actual information is lost in the sampling process. It expresses the sufficient sample rate in terms of the bandwidth for the class of functions. The theorem also leads to a formula for perfectly reconstructing the original continuous-time function from the samples.
Even considering the editing example, if you were to splice two audio streams together, or even mix or transform them, the only reason you'd need more than 44khz is if for some reason
Re:Digital hoarders (Score:5, Insightful)
That's cute. When you're a DJ, 44khz isn't enough. 16 bits is fine. Do you know why? Should I bother telling you?
It has to do with that Fourier transform thing. When you have two different tracks that are in different keys and have different tempos, you need more samples than 44khz to do the pitch and tempo shifting to match the two tracks.
Keep feeling smug, though. Clearly I must be wrong.
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Pro tip: Don't try to act smart if you don't know what you're talking about :-)
The decibel is a logarithmic unit. When I say a dynamic range of 96 dB, that is the different between the noise floor and a full-scale signal. 96 dB of difference is simple a relative value. Talking about dynamic range in decibel-milliwatts as you're doing, makes absolutely no sense at all. DBm is a measurement of absolute power, so you can't use it to talk about relative dynamic range.
Quantization error exists everywhere, even i
Re:Digital hoarders (Score:5, Interesting)
You've got it mostly right, but not completely right. Any sort of digital manipulation introduces noise into the audio stream due to the nature of floating-point math. The more accuracy (or "headroom") you have in both domains (frequency and amplitude), the closer the final mix will be to the original waveform. That's why many studio engineers use 24bit / 192khz source material... not because you can actually hear any difference in the original source, but because it preserves the pristine quality of the source longer as it moves through arbitrary numbers of digital filters and mixing stages.
It's moderately useful for masters as you stated, because those masters can still be digitally manipulated without introducing any additional audible artifact. As indicated by vel-ex-tech, you actually do need additional samples for clean pitch or tempo shifting, but I wouldn't call that a typical "consumer" application.
Of course, for consumer tracks (simple listening), it's utterly pointless, much like the ridiculous Pono player. No one can actually hear the difference, and nearly all reputable double-blind studies confirm this. It's just a "bigger numbers are better" fetish among audiophiles or people who don't understand the science of audio. And frankly, the "loudness wars" have actually decreased the require dynamic range for most consumer music by pumping up the volume and compressing the shit out of it.
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Exactly. It's like RAW images from your camera.
You don't see any difference between RAW and JPGs until you have to save blown highlights, change contrast/shadows/white balance.
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Yes for Nyquist but no in the real world. Nyquist theorem assumes that you have a theoretically perfect ADC and DAC stage with theoretically perfectly filtering. That is not the case. In reality in order to properly filter the HF image post conversion you would need an incredibly sharp impossible to achieve filter just above the audible range. While filtering in the frequency domain is easy enough, doing so sufficiently to avoid distortion but without phase shifts below 20khz is impossible in practice.
The s
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CD audio sampling rate is exactly the same as vinyl quadraphonic encoding rate. They selected it in an attempt to make it possible to put an old school analog quad signal on the CD. They never did though, good choice, just use 4 digital tracks.
Must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
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More important, all those digital processing tools that are in the chain, from EQs to delays and dynamics processors and pitch correction, etc can most definitely tell the difference between a 16-bit signal and a 24-bit signal.
Re:Digital hoarders (Score:4, Informative)
These two videos [xiph.org] are an excellent introduction to audio signal theory.
Highly recommended to all readers enjoying this thread.
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You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture.
That is wrong. Double sampling frequency is the minimu you need to sample the signal. It is not enough to reproduce it accurately. How do you come to that idiotic idea?
Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's
That is nonsense, too.
Everyone can hear if a 16kHz base tone has a 32kHz and/or a 64kHz overtone added ir not. You don't need to be able to 'hear' 32kHz or 64kHz to notice if the sound is mixed in or not.
however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.
A person like you, on a consumer device, likely not. But from proffesional sound engineers it is expected that they can.
No idea where you got your nonsense from ... plenty of the anove is common sense. You don't need a physics degree to graps that.
I really doubt anyone can actually hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit samples. The distinction and use comes in when mixing multiple samples together to preserve maximum accuracy in the result. (And yes, I have professional studio gear) You might also use higher resolution like 32bit+ these days because it's possible.
The frequency range of human hearing is more interesting, have you ever listened to music on studio gear for longer periods of time?
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You can hear it when you play with the volume, or listen to typical artifacts.
Ofc you don't here it when some transformation process calcs it down to 16 from 24 to simply make the output in the amplifier. But it is a huge difference if a hobbyist plays with sounds on 16 bit level and plays the end results or if you process the same sounds with 24 bits and only transform them to 16 bit in the final stage.
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My music collection is almost exactly that size, most of it originally bought on CD over about twenty years. If I was to play all of it non-stop, it would take about 80 days.
As others have pointed out, the person in question is a composer, so I expect a lot of his collection would be recordings of his own compositions, at the highest available quality (uncompressed or losslessly compressed). There might be multiple takes or versions of them. If he recorded them as multitrack recordings (each performer or in
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You just gave me an idea.
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mpd.
lots of cclients to pick from.
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Offtopic?
Perhaps.
Finding a good music player is exactly 'On topic' when discussing iTunes IMHO.
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speaking as I have an over 4 TB music collection,(luckily, I've kept every cd I ever bought, except a few stinkers, and ripped them as original .wav file using EAC or CDparanoia) audacious does a good job of playing everything I throw at it, except some of my very first .wav's I ripped or composed back in the early 90's, before MP3 was out.
Of course, back then I only had a 10 Meg hard drive, so I could only rip 5-10 second pieces of music from Cd's... but it's still funny as hell when Joe Walsh's intro
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What it needs is a really efficient indexing system, client code written by someone with experience using moby datasets and a decent UI to navigate the hierarchy. All the packages I've used so far are miserable, caching nothing and constantly rescanning the server. Understandable for low RAM devices, but nothing is really 'low RAM' these days.
I've considered writing it myself, but figure it has to be a common enough problem. It's worth asking if anybody found a good solution.
Where are you? I'm in N Cal
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If you didn't rip the music with Apple software then when you install iTunes it scans your computer for music it didn't rip and will delete it.
Oh, bullshit. There has never been any such "feature" in iTunes. We're dealing with bugs here, not DRM conspiracies.
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This seems like neither a bug nor a DRM conspiracy, just a typical iTunes misfeature. Some dumb manager at Apple had a little scrum with four other guys who hadn't slept in a week.
"We paid a lot of cash for these streaming licenses and we're barely using them! Why should our customers have their hard drives clogged with music files they can just stream from here? It just makes them run out of disk space trying to install the next version of iTunes, which means we get complaints from our product support team
Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music. (Score:2, Informative)
iTunes has never done what you've said, it is a blatant lie.
You can have it scan directories and it will move files, but it has never identified files as "illegitimate" and deleted them.
Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music. (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.cnet.com/forums/dis... [cnet.com]
http://9to5mac.com/2014/12/03/... [9to5mac.com]
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/0... [cnn.com]
It appears they have in several iterations over the years. The GP is likely conflating several instances but i cannot find fault with it. I am somewhat concerned about your strict denial without even a simple Google search that brought up the links i posted and more.
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I could never quite comprehend the shear insanity of designing your software to delete the user's files with no warning or confirmation. I think it's unique, even among Apple apps that love to manage your stuff for you.
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Apple has too many managers who suck at product design. They're also spooked that iTunes for Windows is the only Apple program that gets installed on PCs, so they try to cram as much crap as possible into it.
Don't these people ever go home and realize that everyone in their family is bewildered by iTunes? "Hey, I just updated my iTunes and the UI is all different- how do I play music now?" "I don' know, I'll ask so-and-so on Monday."
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A friend of mine wiped a part of my music collection 10 years ago, when he wanted to copy some mp3s from his ipod to my computer. He installed ITunes and selected "synchronize". Well, it synchronized the Ipod and my computer just fine, deleting all my mp3s that weren't on his Ipod. I had backups and original CDs, but I really couldn't believe how shitty the Ipod/Itunes design was.
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Either iTunes would sync to the iPod and accept the *iPod* as the master copy, thus deleting all of that person's music from their computer.
Bullshit. iPod was the hub. The iPad was the copy of all or part of the music on that hub. If you changed the computer an iPod was synced to, then it would reflect the music on the new computer. But no music would be deleted off the old computer, nor the new one. That was not how it works.
Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music. (Score:2)
iTunes never accepted the iPod as a master copy. In fact, one of the main complains about iTunes is there's no way to copy songs off a device. iTunes only copy files to devices (although they eventually added the ability to copy only purchased songs off a device).
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Let's start measuring our book collections in cubic meters.
Or board feet per fortnight. Or maybe thickness versus color scale.
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No. 'Library of Congress' remains the standard unit for book collections.
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Because if we can label enough things as PC we can fulfill our claim that there's much PC.
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The original comment is still there.
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You know I used to defend Apple against these accusations. I've been using their products since the 80s. But ever iOS took off and Ive took over OS X, stability seems to have taken a back seat to the shiny new interface and integration between the two.
Right now I am still having issues with Time Machine that have been around for years. And that's their backup solution! You know, the one that's supposed to make sure you're safe? Oh, and good luck finding support for Time Machine on their website. Want a laug