5 ms·

My friend is in his 60s who is not very technical, but is very into music. He has 1000s of (purchased) CDs and vinyl. He has ripped a lot of it onto a local ha

My friend is in his 60s who is not very technical, but is very into music. He has 1000s of (purchased) CDs and vinyl. He has ripped a lot of it onto a local hard drive. I can see how he might think Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files. It seems a failing of modern technology that he needs to understand backup in the sense of bits on a magnetic disk is different to being able to access the files as a network stream. I imagine many tech companies are quite happy to let the confusion continue.

lancesells 4y ago
Isn't his backup his CDs and vinyl? I get the reason for maintaining another backup but your friend seems to be reasonably fine using Apple Music.
- blowski 4y ago
  He's put _a lot_ of effort into ripping them.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  No, because they degrade.
FabHK 4y ago
Would he be able to, or want to, distinguish his particular rip of an album from Apple's rip of an album? If he doesn't, then for all practical purpose Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files, IIUC. The ones that Apple recognizes will be "replaced" by Apple's rip (on synced devices and/or, if he ever deletes the original file, on the original device), often in higher quality, btw, and the ones that Apple does not recognize will be a bit-for-bit copy.
- blowski 4y ago
  The naive mental model of how this works is that Apple is taking the files he ripped onto his hard drive, storing them in the cloud, and then streaming them over the internet to his other devices. As you say, this is effectively what happens most of the time. The quality and consistency is so high that nobody's going to notice a few flipped bits. But for a niche album - a semi-official bootleg of an obscure 70s prog rock band - it goes wrong more frequently. It can't find the original album, but finds one the algorithm it thinks is close enough, but is actually a studio recording of a tribute band.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ben7799 4y ago
  Not even thinking about whether the rip is bit perfect there's no expectation Apple even keeps serving up the version of the master you originally bought and want to keep. It's not even about the rip, it's that they might swap in a rip taken from a different version of the recording. Many albums get remastered.. most of these cloud services will just drop in the new version and the old one is gone. IIRC Apple might be pretty good about this, but you still don't want to surrender control. In any case there have been many albums where the remaster has worse audio quality than the original. If you bought the original you might really want to hang onto that version. The most egregious form of that kind of thing is things like movies like Star Wars where the later editions are different edits of the movie. If you wanted the original you wouldn't be happy your copy was swapped out with the new edit. In the case of music this is often just remasters having a lot more dynamic range compression and heavily boosted levels, but that can still be very objectionable.
endigma 4y ago
I wish a company like synology who operates in this space would drive marketing hard to try and get through this barrier. We're at a point in the world now where billions of people rely on google/apple/microsoft/whatever to do their jobs, and bring that reliance home with them and store their treasured photos or music or videos on these services that could ban them without recourse without a second thought. Reminds me of that post about the parents banned from gdrive after syncing a picture of their child's genitals (for medical purposes, verified) while sending it to a doctor. I'm pretty sure they're still permabanned and without access to their data. I think they even took his phone service, Google Fi away. Someone with money in the game needs to pounce on this, even if it's another for-profit like synology etc they would at least get the mentality that storing things you care about in the cloud is foolish at best.
- swayvil 4y ago
  When you have a machine-learning thingy to do your managing for you it's a golden miracle. But every exception that you acknowledge and address degrades that miraculous functioning. Exponentially. So there's a strong incentive to let 99% accuracy be good enough. And to let the exception-cases go completely to oblivion.
  - blowski 4y ago
    Edge cases aren't frequent enough to have a competitive edge of not having them. Too bad for you when you're the edge case. Backing people's files up for them on my USB storage makes me feel like the aircon repairman in the Terry Gilliam film, Brazil.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      Tuttle, played by De Niro.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    That is exactly how bureaucracies fail, by being unable to handle the exceptional states. 80% of the effort should be spent on how to handle the thing the automatic system didn’t.

lancesells 4y ago

Isn't his backup his CDs and vinyl? I get the reason for maintaining another backup but your friend seems to be reasonably fine using Apple Music.

blowski 4y ago
He's put _a lot_ of effort into ripping them.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
No, because they degrade.

FabHK 4y ago

Would he be able to, or want to, distinguish his particular rip of an album from Apple's rip of an album? If he doesn't, then for all practical purpose Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files, IIUC. The ones that Apple recognizes will be "replaced" by Apple's rip (on synced devices and/or, if he ever deletes the original file, on the original device), often in higher quality, btw, and the ones that Apple does not recognize will be a bit-for-bit copy.

blowski 4y ago
The naive mental model of how this works is that Apple is taking the files he ripped onto his hard drive, storing them in the cloud, and then streaming them over the internet to his other devices. As you say, this is effectively what happens most of the time. The quality and consistency is so high that nobody's going to notice a few flipped bits. But for a niche album - a semi-official bootleg of an obscure 70s prog rock band - it goes wrong more frequently. It can't find the original album, but finds one the algorithm it thinks is close enough, but is actually a studio recording of a tribute band.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ben7799 4y ago
Not even thinking about whether the rip is bit perfect there's no expectation Apple even keeps serving up the version of the master you originally bought and want to keep. It's not even about the rip, it's that they might swap in a rip taken from a different version of the recording. Many albums get remastered.. most of these cloud services will just drop in the new version and the old one is gone. IIRC Apple might be pretty good about this, but you still don't want to surrender control. In any case there have been many albums where the remaster has worse audio quality than the original. If you bought the original you might really want to hang onto that version. The most egregious form of that kind of thing is things like movies like Star Wars where the later editions are different edits of the movie. If you wanted the original you wouldn't be happy your copy was swapped out with the new edit. In the case of music this is often just remasters having a lot more dynamic range compression and heavily boosted levels, but that can still be very objectionable.

endigma 4y ago

I wish a company like synology who operates in this space would drive marketing hard to try and get through this barrier. We're at a point in the world now where billions of people rely on google/apple/microsoft/whatever to do their jobs, and bring that reliance home with them and store their treasured photos or music or videos on these services that could ban them without recourse without a second thought. Reminds me of that post about the parents banned from gdrive after syncing a picture of their child's genitals (for medical purposes, verified) while sending it to a doctor. I'm pretty sure they're still permabanned and without access to their data. I think they even took his phone service, Google Fi away. Someone with money in the game needs to pounce on this, even if it's another for-profit like synology etc they would at least get the mentality that storing things you care about in the cloud is foolish at best.

swayvil 4y ago
When you have a machine-learning thingy to do your managing for you it's a golden miracle. But every exception that you acknowledge and address degrades that miraculous functioning. Exponentially. So there's a strong incentive to let 99% accuracy be good enough. And to let the exception-cases go completely to oblivion.
- blowski 4y ago
  Edge cases aren't frequent enough to have a competitive edge of not having them. Too bad for you when you're the edge case. Backing people's files up for them on my USB storage makes me feel like the aircon repairman in the Terry Gilliam film, Brazil.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    Tuttle, played by De Niro.
- sitkack 4y ago
  That is exactly how bureaucracies fail, by being unable to handle the exceptional states. 80% of the effort should be spent on how to handle the thing the automatic system didn’t.