Apple sends tech guys to iTunes user’s home to fix Apple Music deletion issue

Apple is all about personal service. The tech giant has sent two engineers to an Apple Music subscriber’s house to determine how his 122 gigabytes of files vanished from his library. It has now rolled out a new version of iTunes in a bid to solve the mystery.

Earlier this month, James Pinkstone detailed his frustrating experience with his missing music files on his blog, blaming Apple iTunes for deleting them. As he wrote, Apple deleted his files from his computer through his Apple Music subscription.

When he signed up, iTunes evaluated his collection of MP3s and WAV files, removed the original files from his internal hard drive and stored them to its server when it didn’t recognise the files. Pinkstone said he could “get it back” from Apple, but not only would it take long hours to retrieve all his 122GB files, he would also be getting them back in a different format.

Pinkstone is only one of several people who had encountered similar problems. And when they asked for technical assistance, they were told that they either had misplaced their own files or accidentally deleted the files themselves.

His blog post was picked up by tech publications, forcing Apple to take notice of the problem. In an update he posted on Tuesday, Pinkstone wrote two tech guys from the company had come to his house to troubleshoot the problem. They weren’t able to replicate the problem or even found a solution to it.

“The problem wasn’t cut-and-dry, therefore has proven difficult to replicate. For example, one of the many confusing things about the initial file loss was that only most of my music files had disappeared. Most, but not all. To further muddle the issue, the missing – and remaining – files had little in common; some were WAV, others Mp3, other protected AAC files that I’d purchased through iTunes between 2003 and 2009. Genre, size and artist name varied greatly among the missing files, as did date added. There was no discernible pattern,” he wrote.

Apple has since acknowledged the issue, telling Tech Crunch in a statement that it is taking the reports seriously. It also said it would be releasing an update to iTunes to include additional safeguards. That iTunes update, version 12.4, was released Tuesday. It has an updated design and aims to correct the issue.

In July 2015, Apple blogger Jim Dalrymple revealed that 4,700 songs from his library were missing after he subscribed to Apple Music. He got back about 99 percent of his music, which Apple claimed were never deleted but were only stored in iCloud the entire time. However, for the rest of his missing files, Apple’s theory was that he mistakenly deleted them himself.