Being able to access your massive music library no matter where you are is a great thing. Having an app delete them from your hard drive after it’s given you that access is anything but.
That’s exactly what some users are complaining Apple Music has done. After fingerprinting James Pinkstone’s library of tracks, matching them up, and putting un-matchable songs into the cloud, it apparently decided to do a little bit of Spring cleaning on his hard drive.
If those were songs that Pinkstone had downloaded from a torrent site, that would be annoying. They weren’t, however. Pinkstone had a massive collection of tunes — thousands of CDs, according to him — that he had manually ripped.
Even with a good, automated app that would have been an extremely time-consuming task. I remember how crappy I felt when a hard drive failed and took a few dozen of my CD rips with it. That was irritating enough, but at least it was a dead drive that claimed them — not a piece of software that decided to remove files silently in the background. To make matters worse, the purge also claimed a bunch of Pinkstone’s original compositions.
The old problem of iTunes reorganizing your files is one thing, but actually deleting your files? Inexcusable, especially without getting a confirmation from a user. The official line from Apple is that “the software is functioning as intended.”
“As intended” is one thing, but as users expect it to do something entirely different in this case. Pinkstone believed his songs would be made available via Apple’s cloud, but with loads of empty drive space and no reason to dump his digital tunes he didn’t see the deletion coming.
It’s a very, very good thing he had everything backed up.