Apple Music and what happens to my library....

[Jason Davies]

Hi folks

This is one of those 'surely this is easy but no one talks about it on the web' questions. I have a carefully collected music collection, mostly lossless, often rare and hard to replace. I've had Apple Match for years to get stuff on all devices and I've been wondering about signing up for Apple Music now that it's (sometimes) lossless but can't pin down what happens with the following:

• what happens to the music on my iphone (currently nynced only to the Mac)? Will it still be kept on the phone or it it all 'forced' to be streamed? The signal on my train journey is lousy so streaming is not an option.

• what happens to the library on my Mac? Is there still such a thing as 'my library' I can search within?

• can I still buy a song? I don't plat to use it for ever, just to see if the 'related' introduces me to more than my (lets be honest) 80s-focussed collection;)

Grateful for any answers from those who've taken the plunge.

Cheers,

Jason

[Stephen Watson]

Hi Jason,

I’ve tried to replicate, as closely as I can, my entire CD and vinyl collection on Apple Music and have mostly done it (despite Apple’s/licencee’s efforts to thwart me 😐).

Firstly, I’ve never had match or the equivalent to can’t speak for that.

I have my entire music library downloaded onto my iPhone, but only my library on my iPad and iMac, meaning that I can play anything on my iPhone with no internet and I stream it on the other two. Mostly.

The only difference is where Apple Music didn’t have the music I had which meant I actually used Free Audacity to record the missing vinyl onto my Mac and then uploaded it to Apple Music or bought the CD where possible and did the same thing. You can upload your own music to the cloud and then stream it to other devices which is what I do.

You have to be a detective sometimes! I had three Tangerine Dreams albums in my library when I first signed up. A month or so later I went to play one only to find it wasn’t there 😬. What had happened was than Virgin had put all the early TD albums on one mega-album and removed the original albums. To get around this I then setup playlists for the “missing” albums which allows me to treat them as albums in their own right instead of “tracks 3 and 4 on the Early Years”. I can set my own cover art too!

There are tracks you can buy, but cannot stream and there are definitely some weird licensing issues for Apple Music but that is the way the music companies roll I think, but it’s frustrating and never happened when I owned the music (either physically or via iTunes).

However, I now have 98% of all the music I’ve ever had on my phone to take and listen to anywhere (including all my 7” singles) and it’s a small price to pay for that.

Happy to answer any questions if I can.

Stephen

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung

On 3 Jan 2022, at 18:43, 'Jason Davies' via Sussex Mac User Group <sm...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Jason Davies]

This is useful, thanks. I didn't realise you could upload (you can with Match, I thought Apple Music just gave you free access to their catalogue). My issue is that I have a. ridiculous number of live bootlegs, sometimes the same gig but different recordings and so on, and I worried they would get overwritten/'upgraded'. I would be lucky to find them again, you can't buy them anywhere.

Most of mine was also digitised the hard way from vinyl or cassette years ago, so it gets weird when the iTunes track has a slightly different title (eg 'German remix version').

I didn't quite understand the Tangerine Dream story (glances over at my copy of Ricochet). Do you mean you had it beforehand and then it got 'reorganised'?

I have definitely had iTunes/Music lose stuff, I suspect when I move everything to a new computer. Entire albums disappear, or odd songs. I have a separate non-destructive back-up folder that basically copies anything that's ever in my Music folder. I go into it regularly, muttering 'I'm sure I had this...'. 70% of the time I find it there (this also happened recently with TV/Films when I finally moved everything over from my old computer); thus the paranoia.

Thanks for this. It does sound like my library is (fairly) safe;)

Cheers,
Jason

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Cheers,

Jason

[Stephen Watson]

Hi Jason,

I can’t vouch for uploading items which may have the same name by the same artist that is on Apple Music already as the only ones I have recorded and uploaded were because they did not exist on AM. If you keep backups of all your bootlegs (as it sounds as though you do) then you should be fine if it goes pear-shaped.

You can definitely upload your own recordings and then stream them back down, for example my copy of “You’ve got to be a hustler if you want to get on!” by Sue Wilkinson is inexplicably not in the AM catalogue but I can play it on all my devices after recording the 7” vinyl myself and then uploading it to AM. 😀 

One of my albums was Ricochet & I had it on vinyl since release. Joined up to AM and Ricochet was there so I added it to my library. When I went to play it next it said it was no longer available, or similar! It turned out that the Album had been removed as an individual album, but had been subsumed into “Tangerine Dream - the Virgin Years 1970 to 1978”, or something like that. Ricochet has now become two tracks on a “compilation album”. So, I created a playlist called Ricochet, added just those two tracks that comprise Ricochet taken from the compilation and set the playlist’s artwork to the Ricochet cover. Longwinded but I effectively re-created the album. I have a “virtual albums” folder which contains several playlists like this. Joan Armatrading’s “Show Some Emotion” album is not in the AM catalogue(!) but all but one of its tracks are present scattered across about 3 compilation albums so I’ve made another virtual album of that. It’s very tedious and is the price of streaming …

Apart from this silliness, which I suspect is out of Apple’s hands and in those of the labels and copyright holders, I’ve loved it - pretty much every piece of music I’ve ever had at home (bar a few tracks) I can now listen to when I want in the car or train or bus. That’s worth the annoyances. And the fee … plus of course, I can add anything interesting that I hear.

You may like to try out the “Albums” app. It doesn’t understand my “virtual albums” as Apple’s app does, but it’s got some brilliant features and treats your music like a collection of … albums which is how I’ve always seen my collection.

Cheers,

Stephen

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung

On 3 Jan 2022, at 21:42, 'Jason Davies' via Sussex Mac User Group <sm...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Toby Leighton]

Apple Music plan includes iTunes Match, so basically everything will behave for you exactly as it already does!

Apple Music and the ITunes store are actually two separate things, so some music isn't available in apple music plan, but is available to buy in itunes, I think both vary by region too, so you may be able to use a VPN or proxy to make yourself appear to be in a different country and have more music available (never tried)

I've read horror stories of people having their precious rare bootlegs replaced with studio versions, or Rap/Hiphop with explicit lyrics being replaced with clean versions, but I've never experienced this myself or know any people in real life this has happened to.  I've annoyingly purchased music on places like bandcamp and had say 9/10 songs match and 1 be persistent and refuse to match, so in my experience the audio detection algorithm is pretty strict. the odd unmatched song is not a huge deal but I like my library to be orderly so it sometimes bugs me, but I can't hear the difference which is the really important thing.

Another thing that isn't obvious and may affect playback on other devices or software, is that the traditional (256kbps) matched audio is DRM free, but the new lossless audio + dolby formats are never DRM free, even when matched to music you already own.

Also once or twice I've stopped my apple music subscription, waited a few months and got the 3 months for the price of 1 offer again.  your library doesn't vanish in a puff of smoke if you cancel the subscription, the apple music songs are all there but greyed unplayable out because you don't have the decryption keys any more.  I know a lot of people get scared that everything could go, and thinking back to the days of the hard disk based ipod, where if you connect it to someone else computer you are one accidental misclick away from losing everything it is certainly a valid concern!  I do make regular backups of my whole library to an external hard drive just in case.

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[Toby Leighton]

I looked at those Tangerine Dream albums, as I have a couple of them and hadn't noticed that, but mine are later on 80s, Dream Sequence is still the same.  I didn't add them to my library but inspected them with get-info and for me each song had its respective albums cover art, so I guess it's behaving more like a box set than a compilation?  I would just rename "In Search of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973-1979 Disc 12" to Ricochet.  It will still be a matched song, and should appear across your devices in the way you want it to.  A nice thing is that apple doesn't enforce you to have music labelled their way.

For cover art if it gets messed up you can command-C command-V to copy paste art between tracks, but I suspect with these albums the cover art might actually be ok in the first place.

[Virginia Routh]

I’m a classical music lover, and find YouTube excellent.  I watch it on TV (super concerts from Wigmore Hall and around the world) and also on my phone.  Their library is extensive.  If you want to hear, say, a Sibelius symphony there will be 3 or 4 versions to choose from.  I pay for Premium to avoid adverts.  Virginia

On 5 Jan 2022, at 00:38, Toby Leighton <tobi...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[andrew lancaster]

Virginia, thanks for this. I also am a classical music lover and shall look into  You Tube premium.  No adverts would be a boon!

Andrew Lancaster. 

Sent from my iPhone

On 5 Jan 2022, at 08:32, Virginia Routh <virgini...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Jason Davies]

You (or others) may find it cheaper to use Vinegar safari extension which removes ads and lots of other metaphorical noise for a couple of quid! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303229 Works on macOS and iOS.

cheers,
J

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Cheers,

Jason

[Jason Davies]

Thanks Virginia. Youtube doesn't always offer the same quality sound as 'lossless' (though often it's very good). Also, I wouldn't be able to organise the recordings as downloads without subscribing, and then I would have the problem of how I organise them. I would end up putting them in the Music app so it's a complete circle back to Apple Music anyway!

Like a lot of others commenting, I have some very odd bits and pieces of music that aren't on any of these services so my priority is keeping hold of them. Though many once-rareties are easily available now, there is still a whole pile of things that have been forgotten...

cheers,
J

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Cheers,

Jason

[Jason Davies]

Ah, this is useful information, about the DRM on lossless. I did suspect there would be surprises. ANd the distinction between iTunes store and Apple Music is one I'd missed - thanks.

As for loss of tracks, I've definitely lost things by replacement; I have plenty of AAC versions (192) of something I know I ripped as apple lossless from a Cd or vinyl that has invisibly swapped itself out. More frustrating (because AAC is pretty good) is when stuff simply vanishes altogether. I verified this happened with about 5% of my songs when I migrated from my old machine (which is still sitting there under the desk so not lost forever).

It's the time and effort of curating it that drives me mad, working out which ones have gone astray or been duplicated (one lossless, one AAC <scream>).

Thanks everyone for chipping in. I'll give it a go after double-checking my back-up strategy!

Cheers,
J

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Cheers,

Jason

[Stephen Watson]

When I signed up to AM it was frustrating to find that there were albums with missing tracks which were available to buy on iTunes but not to stream on AM! Grrrrr. That doesn’t seem to be much of an issue now, it’s usually that the entire album is missing even if it’s in iTunes.

Also, thanks for the info about compilations - I didn’t realise that when playing one of those tracks from, say, Ricochet that it pulled the correct artwork from the collection. A boxed set, yes. 😃 

For all its foibles, I find it works really well nearly all the time but is very frustrating if you go to play an album that’s vanished, but that hasn’t happened in ages now. Whew!

Happy listening one and all.

Stephen

P.S. Moby’s Spatial Audio/Atmos album where he covers his own songs(!) is the only album I’ve heard which is actually better in Atmos, the others I’ve heard sound rather muffled and muddy. What have been others’ experience and any recommendations?

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung

On 5 Jan 2022, at 11:25, 'Jason Davies' via Sussex Mac User Group <sm...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Toby Leighton]

Once tunes are showing as “matched” in Apple Music (Which it does through audio analysis fingerprinting voodoo) whatever the original format was it then does an incredibly basic decision of if the bitrate was 128kbps or less it will swap it with their version.  I have loads of ripped cds that I actually went back through and converted on batch away from ALAC into AIF uncompressed (because long reasons) so those tracks when opened on another computer like my work PC will download or stream as either the lossless DRM /256kbps apple format (if they match with the library) OR a 256kbps AAC file that I guess Apple encode themselves when you uploaded from the original computer. So in those cases where I get an album in a lossless format on Bandcamp from someone who isn’t in Apple‘s library it will switch it down for a worse file (same file, lower bitrate but sounds fine to me)

personally at least it’s never taken one version of a song and given me back a completely different version of that song. Not saying it couldn’t happen though, and I’m careful to keep my originals backed up. 

It’s all such a rabbit hole!  But at least I feel like I’ve wrangled control of my library and Apple Music compliments it with the sync convenience and the benefit of more things to listen to on a whim. 

A different minefield/bugbear I’ve come across is where I’ve purchased CDs and records lots of labels and shops will give you a download of a 320kbps MP3 when you place the order.  Having analysed some with the utility SPEK I’ve seen these officially purchased files have a hard 20khz cutoff, whereas the Apple Music matched version of the same file when analysed has the full dynamic range, but “only” at 256kbps, or lossless (but I can’t analyse those lossless due to the drm).  In those cases I’d rather have apples version than the one I bought.. All this has somehow taught me or conditioned me to just listen and enjoy the music and try not to dwell too much on the technicals.  

When I first subscribed on a trial I fully intended to cancel and go onto the next trial of soundcloud, then the next trial of spotify, then the next trial of YouTube, then the next trial of amazon, and so on for ever. But at some point the Apple offering just clicked for me and the recent addition of lossless sealed the deal. 

I’ve only listened to apples ATMOS files through ordinary headphones so I’ll reserve judgement, however pre-Apple I’ve listened to surround mixes from a few producers downmixed to “ordinary” 5.1 home cinema DTS and enjoyed the clarity and spacing, but I have to reserve judgement until I get a real atmos system to listen to.  There are producers who I follow who I know have created atmos versions of some of their albums but they aren’t available on Apple, also going back in time there are the 70s quadrophonic mixes of Pink Floyd and their SACD 5.1 mixes which could be Atmos mastered but aren’t (yet?). It could be a gimmick like 3D TVs and cinema or it could become standard practice.  Will definitely check out Moby Reprise though at least with headphones for now.  Interestingly it doesn’t come up for me in Apples Atmos playlists yet there it is when I go directly searching for Moby.  Did The Doors really master “Riders on The Storm” with Surround in mind back in 1974? Or Blondie Hanging on the telephone and Call me?   It reminds me of 3D cinema post Avatar when lots of movies were in 3D for the sake of it, digitally upscaled to 3D. I’m sure the difference comes through in the finished article when it was the producers intention to be listened to in surround from the outset rather than tagging on to the latest fad or some posthumous studio magic. 

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[Stephen Watson]

Very interesting Toby and all. 🎼 

Atmos/Spatial should sound great on headphones. We have two ears and no matter how many speakers and channels in your lounge they go into our brain via two ears and contain the information for up, down, back, front, a little bit behind and every other nuance. Years after we first had binaural/dummy head recordings I’m not sure why we’ve not been able to enjoy this for years, at least as an option as it obviously wouldn’t work that well on speakers. Rather like 3D/Stereoscopic pictures which I’ve loved since I was a kid. A young kid, anyway!

I’ll check out Blondie then …

Virginia, I don’t know if you were aware but Apple bought up a company a while ago that specialised in streaming (I think!) classical music which treats composers, movements, acts, and all the rest better than Apple do at present so it’s expected that it will find its way into Apple Music - maybe in iOS 16.

There’s an interesting article on MacStories.net talking about Last.fm (which I knew nothing about until a few days ago) along with multiple alternative apps that focus on different musical areas from Apple’s own app, if such things take your fancy.

Cheers,

Stephen

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung

On 5 Jan 2022, at 21:14, Toby Leighton <tobi...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Virginia Routh]

Thanks, Stephen.  I tried Apple Music also Spotify but neither have an extensive catalogue of classical music.

On 5 Jan 2022, at 22:01, 'Stephen Watson' via Sussex Mac User Group <sm...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Very interesting Toby and all. 🎼 

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[Stephen Watson]

That may change with Apple’s acquisition I suppose. They will let us know I’m sure!

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung

On 5 Jan 2022, at 22:55, Virginia Routh <virgini...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Jason Davies]

On 5 Jan 2022, at 21:14, Toby Leighton wrote:

OR a 256kbps AAC file

I think I've basically gone the same way as you (and this may have happened to me, I note the use of AIFF instead as shrewd but disk-expensive!). 256 AAC is not MP3 even at 320 (I can always tell an MP3, irrespective of bitrate, and hate them).

They could of course have just adopted flac but...sigh.

I guess it's still easier than carrying tapes (which had their own 'lossiness') around in a bag with batteries for the walkman!

Cheers,

Jason

[Toby Leighton]

I had to discipline myself to care less about the quality and accept when things are “good enough”  I too can absolutely hear the difference in lower bitrates (~128), and I don’t believe I have golden ears or am some sort of audiophile. When I’m at home, in peace and quiet, listening to music yes absolutely I want the lossless files, or put on a record and listen to it, and sometimes rarely now even put a CD in the player. However when I’m out and about lossy music on my iPhone while walking about or driving is absolutely acceptable. There’s all the noise of the outside world so you aren’t in “perfect listening conditions” so the MP3s or AACs are fine.

The bit of this that Apple Music/iTunes Match nails for me is I don’t need to curate two versions of my library, a lossless one at home and a second compressed one to take with me. AIFFs and CDs are at home in the computer, and they are instantly available to stream to my phone without having to do anything extra.  

Likewise I can think of something to add out and about or recognise something with Shazam.. add it to the library and the lossless Apple Music one is waiting for me when I get home.