Apple Music—Woe Woe Woe

Meryn Cadell’s “Sweater” — I particularly recommend “Flight Attendant” and “Job Application” but they don’t have video clips that I can find.

We’ve been an Apple Music family pretty much from day one. I used to spend a lot of time and money in stores shopping for albums. Now I have access to pretty much everything there is (including comedy albums) for the price of a CD per month.

I love the fact that my kids can just play any music they like and aren’t forced to filter down their tastes to whatever is in our CD collection, or their friends like, or what’s on commercial radio (not that we listen to commercial radio).

I also love the fact that when I get a new Apple device it just effortlessly has everything in my library on the device the next day.

But…

As I said, I used to spend quite a bit of time buying music. So I have some unusual stuff. Also, I lived in Australia for a long time, so I have a lot of stuff that isn’t available in the US or is available in subtly different form in the US. Similarly, my wife is a huge David Bowie fan and has some hard-to-get Bowie albums, e.g. Japanese and British imports.

We’ve both been ripping CDs for a long time, and in 2012 we ripped everything we hadn’t already ripped as part of packing for a move.

So now we have music that isn’t quite recognized by iTunes. To some extent it gets synced across our devices, probably via a process that went like this:

  1. (Before Apple Music existed) explicitly send music to iPhone
  2. When we get new phone, restore phone from backup on Mac.
  3. (Later) Restore phone from cloud backup.
  4. (Apple Music arrives) Hey, as a service we’ll look through your music library and match tracks to the thing we think it is in iTunes and rather than waste backup space, we’ll simply give you copies of our (superior!?) version. Oh, yeah, it’s DRMed because we need to disable the tracks if you stop paying a subscription fee.

Now this mostly works swimmingly. But sometimes we encounter one of three failure modes:

  • You have something Apple Music doesn’t recognize
  • You have something Apple Music misrecognizes (this happened in the old days when the hacky way iTunes (using the CDDB et al) identified tracks would identify an album incorrectly and misname it and all your tracks, but you could fix it and rename them manually)
  • You have something Apple Music recognizes correctly as something it doesn’t sell in your current region, and disables your ability to play it!

The first failure means that Apple may be able to restore the track from a backup of a device that had it, but it won’t restore it otherwise. So you have to find a machine with the original (non-DRMed file and fix it).

The second failure means that Apple’s Music (iTunes on a Mac) application will start playing random crap. If you’re lucky you can find the correct thing in Apple Music and just play that instead, but now you’re stuck with Apple’s DRM and may even end up losing track of or deleting your (non-DRMed) version.

The third mode is particularly pernicious. I have a fantastic album by Canadian performance artist Meryn Cadell (Angel Food for Thought) that I bought after hearing a couple of the tracks played on Phillip Adams’ “Late Night Live” radio program many years ago. I freaking love that album. For years, Apple would sync the album from device to device because it had no freaking clue what it was…

But sometime recently, Apple added Meryn Cadell’s stuff to Apple Music. As far as I can tell, it makes a second album (that I didn’t know existed) to the Apple Music US region but not Angel Food for Thought. So it knows that Angel Food for Thought exists but it won’t let me play it.

Now, I happen to know where my backups are. I fired up iTunes on my old Mac Pro and there’s Angel Food for Thought. It plays just fine. Then I turned on “sync to cloud” and all the tracks get disabled. It’s magical, but not in a good way.

This is ongoing… I will report further if anything changes.

Update

After escalation, I’ve been told iTunes is working as intended. So, basically, it will play music it can’t identify or that is DRM-free and already installed, but what it won’t do is download and play music from iTunes that (it thinks) matches music that (it thinks) you have if it doesn’t have the rights to that music in your jurisdiction.

So, I have the album “Angel Food for Thought” which iTunes used not to know about, so it just worked. But, now iTunes knows that it exists BUT it doesn’t have US distribution rights, so it won’t propagate copies of “Angel Food for Thought” to my new devices (but it won’t stop me from manually installing them). Super annoying, but not actively harmful.

It does seem to mean that there’s a market for something that lets you stick all your own music in iCloud and play stream it for you.