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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 Mu

by 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.
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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.

by FabHK 4y ago

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.