Apple Music has been a moderate success since its launch, but is certainly not without faults – hence an expected overhaul of the service next month – and a user whose entire music library was unceremoniously deleted by the service received a home visit from Apple engineers to investigate the problem.
A blog post by James Pinkstone went viral a couple weeks ago, in which he detailed how his 122GB personal music collection was deleted by iTunes after he signed up for Apple Music on his Mac. An Apple Support representative seemed to confirm to Pinkstone that this unexpected deletion was actually an intended feature of Apple Music, and he was rightly outraged.
However, a follow-up post shows that since his story blew up, Apple technicians have got in touch to confirm that the service is not intended to delete local files in that way, and the customer service representative was mistaken. It’s more likely, they say, due to a rare bug in the iTunes software. Apple’s engineer’s confirmed that although they have heard tales of this deletion bug, they haven’t been able to recreate the issue to figure out the best way to solve it.
So, not long before this week’s iTunes 12.4 update, Apple sent a couple of engineers to Pinkstone’s house in an attempt to see the problem in a live environment. In a follow-up blog post, he notes that although they spent almost the whole weekend working on it, the team was unable to recreate the issue completely, though they did take some valuable information from it. Apple plan to release a further update to combat the iTunes bug as best they can.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t an entirely successful trip, it’s nice to see Apple taking these kind of problems seriously. Here’s hoping everything will be sorted sooner, rather than later – perhaps in time for WWDC?