Eons ago when I had first encountered iTunes, I will admit that I really hated it–but I will also admit that it *worked* which is ya know, like the most important thing ever about software? We just had a difference in opinion on how things should work, but it did work, and for that I respected iTunes despite the sour taste it left in my mouth. For friends, it was often the gold standard unless they were fellow unix nerds.
Importing music into Apple Music is mostly painless. Drag a folder of tunes onto the icon and boom, it’s imported. The tag editor even makes it easy to add album art and metadata, if so inclined.
And here’s the rub?
Drag and drop “Alan Jackson – 34 Number Ones” onto the icon, it imports, it plays, the files get organized into “$HOME/Music/Music/Media.localized/Music/Alan Jackson/34 Number Ones” by way of the default copy and organize settings. Yup. All good. Everything working perfectly! Now quit and relaunch Apple Music, and go open the album. Suddenly tracks 4, 20, 32, and 33 are present out of tracks 1 through 37 but here’s the real kicker: the files are still in Apple Music’s library on disk, they just are not in the database after quitting the app!
Now I know why the fucking hell partial albums were showing up on my iPod for some of my content that came from my old MP3 files rather than re-rips to fresh AAC/M4A generated in Apple Music. At first, I thought that it might have been because these are later 320 Kbit/s files encoded for quality unlike the 128 Kbit/s typical of older files. I considered those worth breaking out the stack’o’discs and external optical drive for ripping again, but these don’t need anything else.
Why is that a problem? Well, guess what: Apple Music just destroyed any faith or trust I have in its ability to _ever_ manage my music collection. Because if you can’t reliably import and database files reliably, you cannot be trusted to manage them safely. I could forgive throwing up your digital hands in horror with an error message decrying the files as unable to be imported; that would be fair because it’s descriptive if you encounter some kind of error. Silently flushing data into the aether on the other hand, not so much, even if you leave the files on disk.
For shits and giggles, removing the album removes the 4 tracks from its place on disk and leaves the other 33 behind. Which suggests that it really is a logic error somewhere, as if Apple Music imported the files but forgot to mark them as imported, so it doesn’t actually manage them. Trashing the entire folder on the other hand and re-importing, has a more interesting result. The GUI loads the entire set of files but only the same 4 tracks are copied into the library.
SMH, seriously what the fuck, Apple!
As far as I can tell, this occurs irrespective of the location of imported content. I’ve copied the file server’s master copies to my laptop, so that I could non-destructively sort them into imported and review folders after reviewing what’s ready to drag’n’drop as is, which will need updating metadata, and which require some thought (e.g. albums with mp3/flac and mp3/wav side by side), and so on. That eliminates any possibilities of the network or removable media, and ya know, checksums are kinda reliable at detecting oops a file is corrupt. I don’t think that I’ve had any problems with content directly ripped from disc, only with files imported.