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On 05/05/16 21:41, Simon Avery wrote: > I know a fair few of you demonise Microsoft for unethical business > practices, but you might want to widen your view... > > https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/ > > Quite astonishing. Especially "/people who cancelled their Apple Music > subscription after the free, three-month trial, only to discover that > all of their own music files had been deleted and there was no way to > get //them back/" Surprised there hasn't been a fuss about this before - over the years I've had many clients that are fully down with the Apple ecosystem and even more who have ended up using iTunes - even on Windows - somehow or other. That increasingly involves iCloud accounts, online syncing and even outright transfer (as in this case). I hate having these machines in for upgrades or transfers to newer boxes. iTunes has been screwing up music libraries for years just by itself even without 'help' from Apple Music. Different versions have had different default options and different forests of obscure option boxes to double check over the years, but it's common for iTunes to default to creating a copy of the users entire music library, sometimes transcoding (badly, lossily) to Apple's preferred AAC format on the way. The new library has obfuscated file paths and the API to interact with the library changes at Apple's whim, which is why iDevice library support is so flaky on Linux. To add insult to injury, because this will of course effectively double the storage required for your music library and fill your laptop's tiny little SSD too quickly, basic googling for shrinking iTunes libraries will inevitably lead users to running "Consolidate your library" which makes things even worse, often flattening down the collection and removing the original "duplicates" from your nice organised file hierachy and moving them into your crappy obfuscated iTunes library. Of course, any stuff you buy online from the iTunes store is *only* stored in the library and not as simple, accessible and clearly named files. Basically, unless warded off, iTunes defaults to vampiring all your stuff under its control. I dread doing iTunes/iCloud system moves or upgrades, there's so much unnecessary brain damage to have to manoeuvre around. And then there's family sharing accounts, which break it all even more and then the final escalation to this Apple Music silliness. For what it's worth, transfers and recoveries are much easier on Apple computers which have really well architected mechanisms for importing/exporting data - on Windows, it's a nightmare. iTunes on Windows is just beyond hateful, and has been destroying music collections for years now with no help from the cloud at all... I can only imagine how much worse this is going to make it all. Give me a month or two and I guarantee I'll have a machine in with this to fix - of course the prevalence of iPhones as a fashion item mean that these days most Windows home PCs I see have iTunes installed and greedily stealing all file associations. Did Clementine on Linux ever get stable bang-up-to-date iDevice support? I haven't tried for a while, but it never worked with my older iPhone. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq