This may be more an issue for the older members; who have come to realize that the amount of music listening time is becoming more and more limited.
Sorta the opposite for me. I still don't own a cell phone so you can imagine how much more free time I have than most. I'm 63, work retail 40 hrs/wk on shift, spend as much time as possible in the garden and listening to music. I do lots of normal things like TV, cleaning up and keeping my wife happy, but other than keeping my wife happy I'd much rather listen to music while I garden. I still have every record that I bought and survived 3 sons and have kept most of the records that people have given me over the years.
Here's an old shot of most of my collection. (from the Vinyl Solution thread)
My Weight Set - It's designed to hold down the basement floor in case of the big one. (yes, that is jules and the polar bears leaning up against the chair)
and after Hopefully this is the final move. When I was younger and didn't own much music I played them a lot more than I do now, but I haven't forgotten them (mostly). I can still just stand in front of the vinyl and read the splines and rehear what caught me the most. I've been luckier than some in that my oldest brother was/is the Jazz guy and would allow me to listen to (not touch) his collection. My older brother was a little more party and the Country guy. Left me to cross into all that other stuff. My best friend from High School was also a music nut and we had a pretty interesting collection between us. He was an album listener and I loved making C90s. Like some others have mentioned, I still have boxes of cassettes, 45's and 78's that I know I will probably never get around to listening to but, I have them just in case. Here's a pic of part of rostasi's vinyl
Drooling noises.
I think I would make good retired folk. I've been having a blast these last few winters since I learned that basic Garageband. I really can't explain the connection I get with the vinyl while holding that square foot, reading the notes, seeing who's playing and just letting it transport me to a time where most likely I'll find something else to explore. I'd also have a pretty constant stack of lp's on the floor that I'd want to put into a mix and sort out later. Music is so much fun.
Has anyone used iTunes's Genius feature to help create playlists? When it first came out, I disabled it because it mostly seemed geared towards selling music, but now I think i might be useful.
I've used iTunes Genius occasionally, and it's OK. Good for a quick dinner playlist. I eventually turned off Genius because it slowed down my (clunky, old) computer when phoning home
A few years ago when I was making more specific genre mixdiscs for restaurants and/or my wife, for instance, I used it and it worked surprisingly well, but after my collection hit half-a-million, it couldn't keep up and would stall and finally never give me final results.
So after all this discussion of when enough is enough I get an email from WistRec offering a slightly cut price deal (plus a break on the shipping which makes it a better deal) on four of their Jackdaw format releases. Each is made up of one or two 3" CD releases of experimental/field recordings material based on a particular location/point in history, and comes in a folder with various period photos, realia, etc, limited to a run of 130 for each release. Do I really need to add four of these to my collection, I ask myself?
What's more, I somehow manage to convince myself I'm cutting down on new acquisitions...within a day or two after the latest purchase. I really have managed not to take advantage of the latest eMu booster offer, though I guess it's not over yet...
I've used iTunes Genius occasionally, and it's OK. Good for a quick dinner playlist. I eventually turned off Genius because it slowed down my (clunky, old) computer when phoning home
Okay, thanks. Considering how easy it is to create a playlist on the fly on iDevices, genius doesn't seem that essential.
I have about 190,000 music files (mp3, m4a or ogg). During the last year or two my collection has increased exponentially. I usually store the new stuff in the TO BE FILED folder (with subfolders for each 2 or 3 months of acquired music). The To be Filed folder has about 30 gigs of stuff. Only when I have listened and rated do I store them inside my primary collection. Of course, a lot of these samplers/compilations are impossible to file. I agree that smart playlists are the solution, but on my box I have a lot of stuff I am not that interested in listening to. Also, I think it would use a lot of system resources to keep creating those unending playlists. (I'm on Amarok which though powerful is a memory hog).
A streaming appliance is ideal, but the media drives are usually skimpily sized or consumed a lot of power or warmed up the room. I mean, I don't want to keep a media appliance running simply because I might want to stream it. I like the idea of using an upload-to-stream service, and even though they are fairly cheap, they are not that user friendly (except perhaps for Google Music) and just have way too many limits. Also, the uploaders tend to be somewhat flaky. (Amazon's is the best -- and yet I had to babysit it a lot).
I have put my favorite albums and tracks on my android tablet (which has almost 64 gigs in its memory card). I love all that stuff -- and stream it to my bluetooth speaker -- but even I find it somewhat tiresome after a while. I end up streaming purchases from amazon or emusic or wherever when I get bored...
Even with just over 50k tracks, I long ago stopped grabbing samplers - the handling cost alone outweighs the benefit with finite listening time. (Good compilations are another matter, though uncommon.)
Even with just over 50k tracks, I long ago stopped grabbing samplers - the handling cost alone outweighs the benefit with finite listening time. (Good compilations are another matter, though uncommon.)
Interesting point. That does seem like a smart approach. However, for me, since I focus my purchases manly on my wish list, thus older releases, if it were not for samplers I would spend very little time with current music. Some would argue that I wouldn't be missing that much.
To me, clearly streaming offers a much better way than samplers to sample the current zeitgeist on-demand, at a pretty low cost ($10/mo). Plus you get a much much wider catalog to sample from. Serious listeners should view streaming as a valuable supplement to their library, not a replacement, imo.
That is a horrific story, but I think it's worth noting one can separate "Apple Music" from "iCloud Music Library" - you can turn off the latter and not suffer the risk of what happened with that author. (Though, granted, that behavior is unconscionable.)
I absolutely still grab samplers, at least from labels I know/like/am interested in. Every once in a while, something really good churns up from the depths of the "not recently heard" playlist. I did a Spotify trial recently, and found I didn't use it enough even to justify the 10 bucks.
Eta, there goes any vanishingly small chance that I would ever use iTunes Match. Can't quite fathom how anyone who cared that much wouldn't have multiple copies of his hard drive though.
His warning about information (and media) as a "utility" is exactly right though. I used to joke about curating my collection of vintage mp3's, not so silly as it once sounded.
That is a horrific story, but I think it's worth noting one can separate "Apple Music" from "iCloud Music Library" - you can turn off the latter and not suffer the risk of what happened with that author. (Though, granted, that behavior is unconscionable.)
I don't do any of this, but my wife said that almost the same thing happens with iBooks thru them. She discovered one day that she couldn't open a book, while offline (probably on an airplane), that she had already purchased. Apparently, it was in the Cloud and only accessible that way. I guess what you're buying is the right to read (or hear?) something.
Goodness, that is a horrific story, and this report:
Amber relayed to me that she’s had to suffer through many calls from 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.
is just stunning - Apple seriously thinks that deleting someone's music library as a "feature" in a temporary free trial is OK? Really?!??
Digital music wishes it was eBooks - "How come they got to have DRM and we didn't?"
With any "e-reader," you need to make sure the book you want is "on your device" before going offline. (Kindles are always online, unless you don't have cell service.)
Not hard to imagine a day where they check, before you play a song or movie or read a book - even your own copy - whether you have "rights" to do so. I remember one of the early Windows music services had just that message before you played a file.
For about ten years, I’ve been warning people, “hang onto your media. One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so. They can alter history, and they can make you keep paying for things that you formerly could have bought. Information will be a utility rather than a possession. Even information that you yourself have created will require unending, recurring payments just to access.”
I've been warning about this since the 90's. Content holders only want the revenue. The actual music, books, whatever are a pain; as far as the service providers are concerned. Google "amazon 1984" for just one other example.
For those you don't know the history, you might be surprised that one of the key drivers of this trend is fighting your right of resale. They view the content as theirs to control and absolutely do not want to you be able to sell it, ever. You can sell your vinyl and CDs but try selling your mp3s....
Resale is a factor, but it is going beyond resale to "we don't want to sell it to you in the first place, we would rather you keep paying us every time you use it." In other words it is not just that they don't want me to sell my MP3s to another person, they don't even want me to control my own access to them.
@Germanprof I'm with you. I was pointing back to the earlier stages. To a certain extent, you have a company named Autodesk to thank for the pure licencing model. Others had tried it but they were the first major player to force it on their users. Of course Windows 10 is just another step along this path of renting rather than owning.
So, how long before the various content owners convince Congress that they "own" X% of consumer spending and demand that portion of everyone's income be forward to them automatically (they used a similar argument when getting that tax on CDR sales). Just think of all the extra profit without the need to bother with any marketing. Surely everyone will be much happier....
That author excessively downplays the possibility of a nasty bug, imo, and I don't think clearly provides the scenario under which the original complainant purportedly deleted all of their original media. They do make the case that iCloud music management is badly abstruse.
The overall discussion does annoy me, though, that it conflates Apple Music with iCloud. If one uses iTunes, AM is almost certainly the streaming service of choice, and they needn't fear this (purported, horrible) bug if they turn off iCloud.
Very long, but very informative post from another forum which may explain in detail the relationship that exists between Apple Music, iCloud and iTunes itself:
So, I don't know what exactly happened to this poor user, but I'm pretty sure that Apple Music is not *designed* to end up in a place where it is actually deleting files off of your computer without telling you. The problem is that Apple Music/iTunes is a very complicated system, and it's hard to tell exactly what happened to the poor guy to put him into his final state.
The current iTunes/Apple Music application is really at least four different applications that manages music in four different ways (I'm leaving out the movies, books and apps part of the system for now).
1. It's a thing that lets you rip CDs and manages the local storage of the results.
2. It's a thing that lets you buy and download music files from the iTunes store, and then manage the local storage of same.
3. It is iTunes Match, which came before Apple Music, which allows you to stream any of the some version of the above files from other computers using your iTunes account.
4. It is Apple Music, which is a spotify-like service that lets you stream music that you have not bought from any computer using your Apple Music account.
The main confusion over how the system works is in how your local catalog interacts with Match and how they both interact with Apple Music. Apple also made the unfortunate decision to make the Match and Apple Music services different even though they are in the same app and even though on the surface they do very similar things with files that are already local to your computer. I think this is where the original user got into trouble, but I'm not sure.
So what does Match do? It does two things:
1. It makes the various bits of music that you ripped or bought from the store available for streaming from any computer that you have your iTunes account on.
2. As part of (1) it maintains a catalog of the music you can stream in Apple's servers.
The way this works is:
1. Any music you bought from the store is automatically in the shared catalog.
2. Any music you ripped is added to the catalog in one of two ways: iTunes examines all of your local files and sees if they "match" existing songs in the store based on some fuzzy criteria mostly related to file fingerprints or meta-data. If it finds a store file that matches it assumes your local file is the same track and lets you stream that track from the store if you don't have a local copy of it. If it can't find a match it will upload the file to some storage associated with your account, but the number of files you can upload is limited. The matching is done this way to limit the amount of user data the Apple servers need to store. The fuzzy matching does cause some weird issues though, because you might not actually get *exactly* the track you expect, esp. in classical and jazz recordings where the same track has been reissued or remastered multiple times.
Confusingly, Apple Music also uses a system much like Match to integrate files you might already own into Apple Music's shared catalog, but the two systems *are not the same*. I don't know how AM works if you don't keep Match running, because I have not tried that case. Still, it is subject to all the above confusions.
If you have been a long time user of iTunes Match and read the Apple Music docs carefully you would have realized that you wanted to keep *both* subscriptions going in order to be happy. This is what I did with my relatively large catalog and while I have had other problems with Apple Music (and Match, and the iCloud music library) I have never had it delete any local files without telling me.
Early on in Apple Music's launch there were some Internet pieces written by angry users who got into trouble by doing this:
1. Start with a large local music library.
2. Sign up for AM or iTunes Match
3. Think "hmm, all my files are now in this cloud catalog, I will save space by deleting them from my computer".
4. Be sad later, because the cloud library is not really storing your files, most of the time, just a meta-data fingerprint of your files.
I don't think this is what happened to this user. But I do think that he was using Apple Music without iTunes Match and something ended up going wrong with his shared catalog
In some ways I think Apple could have avoided some of this confusion if they had kept Apple Music and the iTunes store in separate applications. Merging that catalogs together makes for a confusing user experience and it's hard to know what to do when something goes wrong. Some people may recall other early reports of Apple Music duplicating tracks or otherwise running into trouble because the iTunes catalog and the Apple Music catalog had some kind of disagreement.
Anyway, you can avoid all of this by not signing up for any of it. Or just playing CDs. But I like playing music from my phone in my car.
It should not be this hard to figure out how to use their service. I have been a happy dropbox user for years. It has never confused me and never lost things; on the contrary it makes a lot of processes in my life easier. I recently turned on iCloud for photos and spent several fruitless hours trying to get things to show up in various locations and navigate their system. I have little appetite for trying to learn how all the different bits of the Apple ecology interact with each other. But then I never even liked the whole iTunes thing of making duplicates of your music files in Apple format in an iTunes folder on your hard drive.
First law of making me happy for software: leave things where I put them.
But then I never even liked the whole iTunes thing of making duplicates of your music files in Apple format in an iTunes folder on your hard drive.
Huh. Would you not have to tell it explicitly to do that? I mean the iTunes format bit. I consider consolidating the library to be one of the neater tricks iTunes can do.
I am getting one of the new iPhones with a lot of storage. I expect to use it for storing/carrying music, but will be proceeding cautiously...
Comments
Amazon search with sorting by review, etc could do the trick.
Sorta the opposite for me. I still don't own a cell phone so you can imagine how much more free time I have than most. I'm 63, work retail 40 hrs/wk on shift, spend as much time as possible in the garden and listening to music. I do lots of normal things like TV, cleaning up and keeping my wife happy, but other than keeping my wife happy I'd much rather listen to music while I garden. I still have every record that I bought and survived 3 sons and have kept most of the records that people have given me over the years.
Here's an old shot of most of my collection. (from the Vinyl Solution thread)
My Weight Set - It's designed to hold down the basement floor in case of the big one.
(yes, that is jules and the polar bears leaning up against the chair)
and after
Hopefully this is the final move.
When I was younger and didn't own much music I played them a lot more than I do now, but I haven't forgotten them (mostly). I can still just stand in front of the vinyl and read the splines and rehear what caught me the most. I've been luckier than some in that my oldest brother was/is the Jazz guy and would allow me to listen to (not touch) his collection. My older brother was a little more party and the Country guy. Left me to cross into all that other stuff. My best friend from High School was also a music nut and we had a pretty interesting collection between us. He was an album listener and I loved making C90s. Like some others have mentioned, I still have boxes of cassettes, 45's and 78's that I know I will probably never get around to listening to but, I have them just in case.
Here's a pic of part of rostasi's vinyl
Drooling noises.
I think I would make good retired folk. I've been having a blast these last few winters since I learned that basic Garageband. I really can't explain the connection I get with the vinyl while holding that square foot, reading the notes, seeing who's playing and just letting it transport me to a time where most likely I'll find something else to explore. I'd also have a pretty constant stack of lp's on the floor that I'd want to put into a mix and sort out later. Music is so much fun.
...
Really looking forward to them arriving!
As for books, if anything it's even worse, at least since I started working at the bookstore.
A streaming appliance is ideal, but the media drives are usually skimpily sized or consumed a lot of power or warmed up the room. I mean, I don't want to keep a media appliance running simply because I might want to stream it. I like the idea of using an upload-to-stream service, and even though they are fairly cheap, they are not that user friendly (except perhaps for Google Music) and just have way too many limits. Also, the uploaders tend to be somewhat flaky. (Amazon's is the best -- and yet I had to babysit it a lot).
One problem is just remembering all the names of albums and musicians I like. I even started a spreadsheet of reviews just to keep everything straight in my mind. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pDSA9n3k2UkXczGgSglTbTkUyNQRC6PonQDu7xPTtCc/
I have put my favorite albums and tracks on my android tablet (which has almost 64 gigs in its memory card). I love all that stuff -- and stream it to my bluetooth speaker -- but even I find it somewhat tiresome after a while. I end up streaming purchases from amazon or emusic or wherever when I get bored...
Eta, there goes any vanishingly small chance that I would ever use iTunes Match. Can't quite fathom how anyone who cared that much wouldn't have multiple copies of his hard drive though.
His warning about information (and media) as a "utility" is exactly right though. I used to joke about curating my collection of vintage mp3's, not so silly as it once sounded.
is just stunning - Apple seriously thinks that deleting someone's music library as a "feature" in a temporary free trial is OK? Really?!??
I am never going near this service.
With any "e-reader," you need to make sure the book you want is "on your device" before going offline. (Kindles are always online, unless you don't have cell service.)
Not hard to imagine a day where they check, before you play a song or movie or read a book - even your own copy - whether you have "rights" to do so. I remember one of the early Windows music services had just that message before you played a file.
For those you don't know the history, you might be surprised that one of the key drivers of this trend is fighting your right of resale. They view the content as theirs to control and absolutely do not want to you be able to sell it, ever. You can sell your vinyl and CDs but try selling your mp3s....
So, how long before the various content owners convince Congress that they "own" X% of consumer spending and demand that portion of everyone's income be forward to them automatically (they used a similar argument when getting that tax on CDR sales). Just think of all the extra profit without the need to bother with any marketing. Surely everyone will be much happier....
No, Apple Music is not deleting tracks off your hard drive — unless you tell it to.
So, I don't know what exactly happened to this poor user, but I'm pretty sure that Apple Music is not *designed* to end up in a place where it is actually deleting files off of your computer without telling you. The problem is that Apple Music/iTunes is a very complicated system, and it's hard to tell exactly what happened to the poor guy to put him into his final state.
The current iTunes/Apple Music application is really at least four different applications that manages music in four different ways (I'm leaving out the movies, books and apps part of the system for now).
1. It's a thing that lets you rip CDs and manages the local storage of the results.
2. It's a thing that lets you buy and download music files from the iTunes store, and then manage the local storage of same.
3. It is iTunes Match, which came before Apple Music, which allows you to stream any of the some version of the above files from other computers using your iTunes account.
4. It is Apple Music, which is a spotify-like service that lets you stream music that you have not bought from any computer using your Apple Music account.
The main confusion over how the system works is in how your local catalog interacts with Match and how they both interact with Apple Music. Apple also made the unfortunate decision to make the Match and Apple Music services different even though they are in the same app and even though on the surface they do very similar things with files that are already local to your computer. I think this is where the original user got into trouble, but I'm not sure.
So what does Match do? It does two things:
1. It makes the various bits of music that you ripped or bought from the store available for streaming from any computer that you have your iTunes account on.
2. As part of (1) it maintains a catalog of the music you can stream in Apple's servers.
The way this works is:
1. Any music you bought from the store is automatically in the shared catalog.
2. Any music you ripped is added to the catalog in one of two ways: iTunes examines all of your local files and sees if they "match" existing songs in the store based on some fuzzy criteria mostly related to file fingerprints or meta-data. If it finds a store file that matches it assumes your local file is the same track and lets you stream that track from the store if you don't have a local copy of it. If it can't find a match it will upload the file to some storage associated with your account, but the number of files you can upload is limited. The matching is done this way to limit the amount of user data the Apple servers need to store. The fuzzy matching does cause some weird issues though, because you might not actually get *exactly* the track you expect, esp. in classical and jazz recordings where the same track has been reissued or remastered multiple times.
Confusingly, Apple Music also uses a system much like Match to integrate files you might already own into Apple Music's shared catalog, but the two systems *are not the same*. I don't know how AM works if you don't keep Match running, because I have not tried that case. Still, it is subject to all the above confusions.
If you have been a long time user of iTunes Match and read the Apple Music docs carefully you would have realized that you wanted to keep *both* subscriptions going in order to be happy. This is what I did with my relatively large catalog and while I have had other problems with Apple Music (and Match, and the iCloud music library) I have never had it delete any local files without telling me.
Early on in Apple Music's launch there were some Internet pieces written by angry users who got into trouble by doing this:
1. Start with a large local music library.
2. Sign up for AM or iTunes Match
3. Think "hmm, all my files are now in this cloud catalog, I will save space by deleting them from my computer".
4. Be sad later, because the cloud library is not really storing your files, most of the time, just a meta-data fingerprint of your files.
I don't think this is what happened to this user. But I do think that he was using Apple Music without iTunes Match and something ended up going wrong with his shared catalog
In some ways I think Apple could have avoided some of this confusion if they had kept Apple Music and the iTunes store in separate applications. Merging that catalogs together makes for a confusing user experience and it's hard to know what to do when something goes wrong. Some people may recall other early reports of Apple Music duplicating tracks or otherwise running into trouble because the iTunes catalog and the Apple Music catalog had some kind of disagreement.
Anyway, you can avoid all of this by not signing up for any of it. Or just playing CDs. But I like playing music from my phone in my car.
Hope this "helps."
First law of making me happy for software: leave things where I put them.
Huh. Would you not have to tell it explicitly to do that? I mean the iTunes format bit. I consider consolidating the library to be one of the neater tricks iTunes can do.
I am getting one of the new iPhones with a lot of storage. I expect to use it for storing/carrying music, but will be proceeding cautiously...