Earlier this month, marketer and composer James Pinkstone narrated a harrowing tale of loss in a blog, wherein he alleged that apparently iTunes and Apple Music connived to remove 122GB music from his hard drive, which included some original compositions as well. However, this is not the first time that Apple Music has created havoc with any user's music library.
Although there have been reports from time to time about how Apple Music plays with the users' local files, Pinkstone's case seemed to be more severe compared to most other reports. In fact, even Apple has now confirmed that it is working on a patch to iTunes to fix the issue, iMore reported.
A spokesperson for Apple told the publication that there have been very few cases when users have reported that music files saved on their hard disc were deleted without their permission. Stating that they are taking the issue seriously, the spokesperson further said that currently, their teams are concentrating on detecting the cause.
"We have not been able to reproduce this issue; however, we're releasing an update to iTunes early next week. The update will include additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue again they should contact AppleCare," the statement issued by the Apple spokesperson said.
The "additional safeguards" mentioned by Apple suggests that a section of users may just be activating an option unwittingly to upload their libraries to the cloud. The new update will make that choice further clear.
Meanwhile, Pinkstone has been receiving mixed messages regarding whether or not the deletion was a design feature or caused by a bug. Initially, an Apple support representative told him that users can permit Apple Music to remove their local music files when they are sure they have a copy in the Apple Music database. Later, a technician from Apple contacted Pinkstone to tell him that this was not true and that a bug was responsible for it, Fortune reported.
Even as some users find storing a personal music collection in the cloud attractive, Pinkstone's experience bring to lights quite a few problems with the idea, mainly for really dedicated music fans. According to him, rare and unique files, for instance, song demos, were wrongly identified as later versions of songs, and subsequently deleted.
Pinkstone further alleged that his hi-definition WAV files were down-coded by Apple Music to MP3 prior to deleting the originals from his hard drive.
