psu_13

Pittsburgh Symphony in Berlin. I am lucky enough to get to see these guys a lot.

My understanding of iTunes match and Apple Music is that the matching system should only affect what appears in the cloud music catalog and should never actually change the local files that are stored on your hard drive (unless you tell it to, on purpose or by accident). Obviously the system is confusing and I could see how naive use might result in a state where you might think that the files are gone. But I remain very surprised at the claim that the files were just deleted by the system. No system is designed to do that on purpose, only by mistake. But as I said before, I have never combined a local catalog *with* Apple Music but *without* iTunes Match, so there could be some extra confusion there, since the matching system in Apple Music is *not* the same. Overall Apple could be doing this better, but as I tried to make clear in my original post, they are fighting a lot of history and complexity. FWIW, I personally use iTunes Match (and Apple Music) so I can play my music off my laptop either when I'm not at home or if I don't fee like turning on my "main" computer. Except for some occasional foibles as described above, it has worked well for me and never touched any of my original files, whether I ripped them myself or downloaded them.

I've probably lost more music on CD than I ever lost off of my computers. (Knock wood). I also had a few CDs rot, but luckily had ripped them already, so they live on, for now, as long as my backups are not destroyed.

So, I don't know what exactly happened to this poor user, but I'm pretty sure that Apple Music is not *designed* to end up in a place where it is actually deleting files off of your computer without telling you. The problem is that Apple Music/iTunes is a very complicated system, and it's hard to tell exactly what happened to the poor guy to put him into his final state. The current iTunes/Apple Music application is really at least four different applications that manages music in four different ways (I'm leaving out the movies, books and apps part of the system for now). 1. It's a thing that lets you rip CDs and manages the local storage of the results. 2. It's a thing that lets you buy and download music files from the iTunes store, and then manage the local storage of same. 3. It is iTunes Match, which came before Apple Music, which allows you to stream any of the some version of the above files from other computers using your iTunes account. 4. It is Apple Music, which is a spotify-like service that lets you stream music that you have not bought from any computer using your Apple Music account. The main confusion over how the system works is in how your local catalog interacts with Match and how they both interact with Apple Music. Apple also made the unfortunate decision to make the Match and Apple Music services different even though they are in the same app and even though on the surface they do very similar things with files that are already local to your computer. I think this is where the original user got into trouble, but I'm not sure. So what does Match do? It does two things: 1. It makes the various bits of music that you ripped or bought from the store available for streaming from any computer that you have your iTunes account on. 2. As part of (1) it maintains a catalog of the music you can stream in Apple's servers. The way this works is: 1. Any music you bought from the store is automatically in the shared catalog. 2. Any music you ripped is added to the catalog in one of two ways: iTunes examines all of your local files and sees if they "match" existing songs in the store based on some fuzzy criteria mostly related to file fingerprints or meta-data. If it finds a store file that matches it assumes your local file is the same track and lets you stream that track from the store if you don't have a local copy of it. If it can't find a match it will upload the file to some storage associated with your account, but the number of files you can upload is limited. The matching is done this way to limit the amount of user data the Apple servers need to store. The fuzzy matching does cause some weird issues though, because you might not actually get *exactly* the track you expect, esp. in classical and jazz recordings where the same track has been reissued or remastered multiple times. Confusingly, Apple Music also uses a system much like Match to integrate files you might already own into Apple Music's shared catalog, but the two systems *are not the same*. I don't know how AM works if you don't keep Match running, because I have not tried that case. Still, it is subject to all the above confusions. If you have been a long time user of iTunes Match and read the Apple Music docs carefully you would have realized that you wanted to keep *both* subscriptions going in order to be happy. This is what I did with my relatively large catalog and while I have had other problems with Apple Music (and Match, and the iCloud music library) I have never had it delete any local files without telling me. Early on in Apple Music's launch there were some Internet pieces written by angry users who got into trouble by doing this: 1. Start with a large local music library. 2. Sign up for AM or iTunes Match 3. Think "hmm, all my files are now in this cloud catalog, I will save space by deleting them from my computer". 4. Be sad later, because the cloud library is not really storing your files, most of the time, just a meta-data fingerprint of your files. I don't think this is what happened to this user. But I do think that he was using Apple Music without iTunes Match and something ended up going wrong with his shared catalog In some ways I think Apple could have avoided some of this confusion if they had kept Apple Music and the iTunes store in separate applications. Merging that catalogs together makes for a confusing user experience and it's hard to know what to do when something goes wrong. Some people may recall other early reports of Apple Music duplicating tracks or otherwise running into trouble because the iTunes catalog and the Apple Music catalog had some kind of disagreement. Anyway, you can avoid all of this by not signing up for any of it. Or just playing CDs. But I like playing music from my phone in my car. ? Hope this "helps."

http://www.imore.com/no-apple-music-not-deleting-tracks-your-hard-drive-unless-you-tell-it

Not a plain recording, but a couple of super lectures on chamber music given in NYC by Bruce Adolphe Haydn: Smetana:

He was just on the Seinfeld web show, which now plays completely differently. http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/garry-shandling-its-great-that-garry-shandling-is-still-alive

This is nice: http://www.amazon.com/Brahms-Works-Cello-Piano-Bailey/dp/B004IA25HE/

I have actually had a few CDs go bad on me. I lost at least one disk in my highly treasured Art Blakey Mosaic set... which I had not ripped in high quality. But I managed to find a lossless rip in the Intertubes so I could download a playable version of the album. That was lucky. I think in the long term hard disk storage + backups might be more durable than CDs, as long as someone keeps making the backups.

I started ripping a lot of my CDs years ago and got maybe around half way through. At some point I got to the stuff that for one reason or another I just don't listen to that much, and then it all showed up on Spotify and Apple Music so I stopped. I still immediately rip new purchases though. I personally can't hear a big difference, if any, between 256K AAC and the various lossless formats. I still rip CDs lossless for "archival" purposes. Whatever that means.

It seems to have just disappeared?

No lossless. Standard iTunes downloads. I suspect that the companies from which Mosaic licensed the original recordings are packaging these things up. A lot of them are in the streaming services too.

This caught my eye: 31. Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, Celebrating Fred Anderson (Nessa). 49 (7)

I like the Rilling set, and tend to lean away from HIP type recordings ... but Gardiner has a more recent series of live recordings recorded over a year in various locales that is pretty compelling. If you really want to explore this material it's a great excuse to sign up for Spotify or Apple Music and stream a bunch of it to see what you like. Most of the major sets are in those services, including the entire Rilling Complete Bach boxed set.

http://audioengineusa.com/Store/A2-plus-B-Powered-Desktop-Speakers Note: I don't think the Airport Express has any audio out via USB.

PM sent

I don't think they are any more limited than other small speaker systems, but I am not much of a bass enthusiast. I enjoy the fact that they are self-powered so I don't have to fuss with yet another box in my life. I have the A5s set up downstairs on my TV and they have more oomph, but are much larger.

There's these http://www.kef.com/html/us/showroom/digital_music_solutions/x_300a/x_300aw/index.html $$$ Most others I've seen are a single box, so no stereo really.

I've not found good ones that are also not expensive. Personally I use the Audio Engine A2 (the small ones) and then just hook them up to an Apple Airport Express or the last gen Apple TV. Great speakers, and the airplay box is not too expensive (about the same as the upcharge for airplay speakers)

FWIW, ASMF is perfectly fine and have made very many perfectly find CDs. I see no reason to judge anyone's taste or lack thereof based on their opinion of any single group or recording or live performance. There are too many variables involved to be hasty about these things. My personal peeve is "historically informed performance" or whatever they are calling those groups who play on old instruments that mostly sound awful. But even there, there are some groups who fall into that category (Apollo's Fire comes to mind) who are really good. So ... I've lost my train of thought. But I think what I meant to say was "do not write off your opinions just because they are your own, you might know/think better than most".

In college, the Amadeus film also caused me to connect to Mozart in a way that I had not before. It was the opera scenes in particular. It's easy to write Mozart off as just so much pretty tinkling, esp. these days when people seem more interested in music that is either older or newer. But IMHO if you do that you are missing out on a lot. Also, don't sleep on Haydn. ?

One of my old favorite records is the ASMF Brandenburg concertos from the 70s. As has been mentioned it is not in line stylistically with what is more popular now, but I am not all that enthusiastic about the current performance styles, in general. On the other hand, there is a "period" group in Cleveland called Apollo's Fire that I can get behind. If you have a Spotify or Apple Music account you can probably compare their performances with the older recording. Actually I bet you can do so on youtube as well... Ah yes ASMF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7BMf96xT0Q Apollo's Fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtIJvA2f1U and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrqP9lm_B9c They are not actually as different as I remembered ... I guess that makes sense since I like them both. ? The second tends to be a bit less stiff, and a little more improvisational. Anyway, the other point I was going to make was that it sometimes a particular performance by a particular band of a particular piece on a particular night just doesn't connect. Classical music (and especially music from the classical period ... Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, etc) sometimes has an emotional distance and level of abstraction that keeps it from really getting under your brain unless the conditions are optimal. I've certainly had this experience more than once. Part of the game, I guess.

NAS is an acronym that stands for "network attached storage". Basically any sort of disk storage that you use a network interface to talk to instead of some other hardware interface. In some sense it's just a fancy name for a file server, but in some contexts its a bit different.

These also seem to turn up with surprising frequency in the U.S. iTunes/Amazon/Spotify databases, even though the recordings are theoretically not out of copyright yet. Ah well.

I came across this download today, it seems to be a mashup of multiple sessions that are now out of copyright, but I can't find them all... anyone know what they are? http://www.amazon.com/Money-Maker-Quit-Go-Traveling/dp/B014871IRE/ Thanks a bunch Pete