Serenity Caldwell, writing for iMore:
On Wednesday, I saw a post widely shared about an unfortunate individual who lost half of their local library and was blaming Apple Music for automatically deleting their local files.
I sympathize, and I’m very glad this person had a backup of their music, but I want to dispel some FUD here: Apple Music has definite problems and its matching algorithms aren’t great, but this is simply not how the service works. Apple Music should never automatically delete files off your Mac’s hard drive unless you specifically delete them first.
Serenity does a terrific job explaining this mess. In a nutshell, back up your original music library and do what you can to never delete music from it. If you need more space, get a bigger drive. If you must delete some music to save space, you are risking going down the rabbit hole of doom, so make sure your backup is complete and dependable.
I sure hope Apple addresses this.
Well, she is wrong. All. The. Way.
When I upgraded to iTunes 12.2 it did delete files from my library. Almost 300 tracks, even some purchased from iTunes. Some of those I could not even re-download, since Apple killed the link to those albums when they did some maintenance on them.
And it does not stop there. It also deleted manually added (ripped) TV shows and music videos. Almost 90 of those.
And I am not imagining that. The files were there one minute and gone the next. The free space on the drive went up and the the files were physically gone.
I did have backups, and still needed weeks to get my metadata and everything somewhat in order. I still suffer from dozens of albums which are split into two or three albums randomly, even with Apple Music turned off!
iTunes has arbitrarily deleted tracks on me at various times in the past.
I had to re-rip my Radiohead CDs on one occasion.
No. She. Isn’t.
The article is about Apple Music and to some extent iCloud. It is not about iTunes. Apple Music is not iTunes.
Speaking of messes, the link for this article in the RSS feed is busted: http://www.loopinsight.com/redirect?s=/feed/&perm=http://www.loopinsight.com/2016/05/05/no-apple-music-is-not-deleting-tracks-off-your-hard-drive-unless-you-tell-it-to/&perm_title=No%2C+Apple+Music+is+not+deleting+tracks+off+your+hard+drive+%E2%80%94+unle
gives you a loopinsight 404. This happens with many links on the loop rss feed.