There’s been a lot written lately about Apple Music, iTunes Match, and the threat of one or the other deleting your music from your music library.
This issue has turned into a perfect storm of fear, uncertainty and doubt. At the end of the day, I believe an understanding of the basic mechanics at work here will make it easy to keep your music library 100% rock solid safe.
First, some background.
For starters, there’s iTunes Match, a service that puts all your music in the cloud, then makes that music available on all your devices.
In order to avoid storing five million copies of a particular track in the cloud, iTunes Match uses a combination of metadata (artist name, track name, etc.) and acoustic fingerprinting (the Shazam technique) to identify a track.
If your track is identified, the copy in the cloud is used instead of your local copy. If iTunes Match does not find a match in the iCloud Music Library, it uploads your copy to the cloud. Either way, the cloud copy of your track is then made available to all your other devices logged in with your AppleID.
A key point here is that the root of the tree here is the iTunes library on your Mac. You MUST start the iTunes Match process from a specific iTunes library. All the other devices will either merge the original Mac’s music with music already on the device, or replace existing music with that Mac’s music.
This is a critical point. Your music library starts life on your Mac, then is supplemented with music you buy elsewhere. As your devices sync, the tracks you buy elsewhere, make their way back to your Mac and are added to your original library. This scenario can get more complex if you have your root music library distributed across multiple Macs, but that is a topic for another day.
Here’s the key issue:
iTunes Match will never delete music from your Mac. NEVER.
So if you back up your Mac on a regular basis using Time Machine, your music is never in any danger.
Apple Music is a slightly different beast, but does follow the same prime directive. Back up your original iTunes Library, just as you would your photos. And never delete music from your Mac, unless you are absolutely certain you don’t want it any more.
To be clear, I am not saying the folks who report bugs with Apple Music and iTunes Match are wrong. I’m just saying that, assuming you’ve backed up your original iTunes Library, those bugs won’t cause you to lose music.
Put another way, I’m suggesting that anyone who lost music did so because they accidentally/inadvertently deleted the music themselves and didn’t have a backup.
One more point, then I’ll let you go. Kirk McElhearn wrote an excellent post on Friday pointing out a bug in the iTunes Match matching system. If you haven’t seen it, definitely do take a minute to read it through.
Here’s what Kirk did:
> I changed its tags to Can’t Feel My Face, by The Weekend. (I picked this track because it’s one of the best selling tracks on the iTunes Store; I could have picked any track in the Apple Music catalog.)
Then he did this:
> I waited for Apple Music to match the file, deleted my local copy, and then downloaded it from the cloud.
At the end of this process, Kirk’s original song was gone, replaced by Can’t Feel My Face.
Kirk did find a bug. Since Kirk had iTunes Match enabled, matching should have made use of acoustic fingerprinting, a la Shazam. iTunes Match should have detected Kirk’s ploy and returned the proper file. If you are interested in learning how iTunes Match and Apple Music do their matching, read this excellent post.
Unfortunately, many people saw this as Apple Music and iTunes Match deleting Kirk’s music. That did not happen. Apple didn’t delete Kirk’s music, Kirk did.
Here’s that last bit again:
> I waited for Apple Music to match the file, deleted my local copy, and then downloaded it from the cloud.
Kirk deleted his local copy. Kirk’s post is absolutely valid and valuable, a real public service. He found a bug in Apple’s matching system, one that Apple needs to find and fix. But Kirk’s music was never in danger from Apple. And this is a key difference.
Back up your music. Make a second copy and keep it in a safe place (I actually have a backup of my music and photos in a safe deposit box, safe from fire). And don’t delete music from your Mac’s iTunes Library.
Thanks for the post. I’m just now starting to get my head around how Apple Music works after many weeks of confusion and it’s finally beginning to make some sense.
I wish Eddie Cue and crew had as much respect for simplifying complexities as Jobs did. iTunes feels neglected, despite the new features.
iTunes Match can corrupt your library. Happened to me last fall. Neither Apple or I could correct after weeks of trying. Apple credited me the subscription cost and turned it off. Fortunately, I had an alternative storage of all the original 1,000+ albums. Still took another week to rebuild my library.
What? Backup files that are important to one? An amazing thought!!!
Yes, sarcasm. Sorry. But we’re at the point of $50 terabyte drives and unlimited online backups. Anyone who doesn’t keep backups of things that are important to them doesn’t deserve sympathy if they’re lost. I’m NOT excusing Apple for any of the Music BS, but backups are SO easy and SO cheap that you have to be criminally lazy or cheap or both not to maintain backups.
Or simply uninformed.
Dave, have you mentioned any of this to Jim?
I have to disagree with this article. While I understand some issues are user error and not fully understanding what is going on, but the bigger problem is when Apple Music and iCloud Music Library do not behave the way they are advertised too. I discovered a number of issues when I tried. While I did not have any music deleted, I did have countless amounts of metadata destroyed and just annoying quirks in Apple Music such as you can add this song to your library but not this one, and Apple does not make it clear why this is . Bottom line if you are having to strongly suggest having a backup before using a publicly released product, then maybe that product needs to go back to the drawing board.
“…but the bigger problem is when Apple Music and iCloud Music Library do not behave the way they are advertised too.”
That’s WHY you backup. People think of backups as something you do to protect against the drive frying, your device being stolen/lost/destroyed but the real reason you backup is insurance against bad things. Those bad things can be all of the above OR simply “this online service is crap and destroyed my data.”
Bottom line? People don’t like it but it’s YOUR responsibility to backup and safeguard your data. That’s not excusing a service that DOES damage it, but failing to backup these days is akin to leaving your car unlocked and complaining to got stolen. The car thief is still a criminal, but come on, lock your damn car.
Would someone please clear something up for me – in all these recent articles, is “Apple Music” shorthand for iCloud Music Library?
I’ve never enabled iTunes Match, and though I joined the trial subscription of Apple Music, I haven’t enabled iCloud Music Library on any of my devices … wondering if any of this applies to me.
Thanks
Jon
Where not talking about the need to backup, yes backups are important and your responsibility. But I think that Apple needs to work on it’s services when these are only recommended if you backup, yes things happen and backups is your insurance, but I would’t buy a car if its only recommended If I have really good insurance. It’s implying something bad is going to happen.
You buy insurance IN CASE something happens. That’s the point. No one is saying that Apple services don’t need work, we’re saying that it’s idiotic to not have regular backups as insurance just as it’s stupid to buy a car and not buy insurance. Feel free, but if your car gets wrecked and you’re out that money no one will sympathize with you. Same for losing data…
It’s 2015. At some point people need to stop doing the Luddite, “All this tech is confusing” stuff.
No. Apple Music is the streaming service. iCloud Music Library is the cloud library. You can use Apple Music without using iCloud Music Library, and you can use iCloud Music Library with iTunes Match, and not with Apple Music, if you wish.
Thanks – I think Dave, Jim, and other bloggers need to start being more precise with the terminology.
I’m getting a little tired of these “nothing to see here” write-ups about Apple Music and it’s how it’s our fault for not backing up… The truth of the matter is that Apple iCould Music Library messed up peoples meta data inside their master iTunes Library (from my understanding, this happened mostly to people who have used iTunes Match at some point in the past). While that’s technically not “deleting”, at the end of the day it means your library is ruined. Can we please stop pretending like Apple never alters your files on your hard drive? That’s just not true.
Yes, iTunes Match has deleted music from my library.
Thank you, that is my point!
And if you backup before enabling a service you can revert back and get things back as they were including the metadata.
You don’t seem to get what I’m saying. The narrative of this article is “anyone who lost music did so because they accidentally/inadvertently deleted the music themselves … iTunes Match will never delete music from your Mac. NEVER.” That is a disingenuous statement at best. Nobody is asking for sympathy… nobody is arguing that having a backup is a good idea. But stop pretending like Apple didn’t fuck this up, just because it didn’t happen to you.
A real problem in Apple Music is the way it shows all the songs in the “My Music” section: why in “Artist” listing order I have no Compilation (in the same way if I order by “Compilation” I have no Artist Album ? The only way is choosing the “All Songs” list that is a bit confused…
I h event been saying apple didn’t fuck things up. However, there’s an annoyingly entitled, ‘I do’t have any responsibility’ thread that always pops up in discussions like these where people refuse to accept that if they just kept backups this stuff would be an annoyance and not a major source of data loss.
THAT is what I’m pushing back on – the idea that people don’t have any responsibility for taking care of the data that they swear is so important to them.
Clear as mud. Call me simple, but I miss the days of wired syncing. iTunes doesn’t even do that right anymore.
Nobody is talking about backups! Re-read the original post, and then my first comment (and my second one). If you’re reading entitlement, then that’s happening in your head. Your talking to me about the wrong issue. It’s great that you want to be a back-up advocate… more power to you. That is not the problem with this article.
I did read the original article. You, perhaps, did not. To quote:
…So if you back up your Mac on a regular basis using Time Machine, your music is never in any danger.
Everyone wants to focus on the confusing, perhaps buggy interaction of Match and Music but overlooks that sentence. My entire point is that doing that eliminates the risk and if you do run into issues lets you move back in time to the state in which you started so all of the hand-wringing about lost data is irrelevant.
apple music IS corrupting playlists, album art, and metadata users carefully entered. Read thru the comments at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7104505
While iTunes Match may not delete files from your Mac, it will most definitely modify your music library. From what I can tell, playlists with unmatchable music were simply deleted from my library. Yes, the files were still there, but the playlists that I painstakingly curated were deleted. I had to recover my library from a backup and will not be using this service anytime soon. People’s FUD about iTunes Match and iCloud Music is well justified.
I do not trust any system to take care of my library so will never use such thing.. I have all my music on my hard drive , arranged in files, if i need to listen to then I use iTune, if I want to listen to them on other divides, I transfer them(old school) only the ones bought on iTune are available everyone of course. NB I am a dj using Traktor, that is why I trust only myself with my music.
agreed
and I back up everything on CCC atlas once a month by the way