Question: Ending Apple Music subscription will destroy your music collection
I collect records mostly physically, because there is nothing that can beat that. Sometimes I buy digital, but only if there is a Lossless format available. But for comfort of digital availability I have spent a lot of time in the past digitalising my collection, from vinyl and CDs. I was always quite happy with iTunes supporting a Lossless file format (Apple Lossless) and accepting my own rips. Syncing to iPod and later iPhone over cable was working quite fine for me.
I never really had an interest in streaming audio services, except for a general curiosity for the available library, but I've always (and still) found it disappointing at best. So many items missing from my favourite artists, so little information on important details.
Anyway, with an extensive collection already being in iTunes it did become tempting to try the iCloud Library functionality of Apple Music so I signed up and stayed for over a year.
In the end I found that I do like the ease of adding something on the desktop and seeing it appear on my phone, but it wasn't really worth the monthly cost. I thought I would use Apple Music more to discover new artists and sounds, but the recommendation algorithm is very sad and nearly insulting, and the commercial push to music I strongly don't care about is strong and everlasting. I thought I'd be better off with the old situation and save $10 a month to spend in the new arrivals section at my local 2nd hand records shop.
So I quit Apple Music (december 2019, or january 2020), and went back to playing actual records, forgetting about my digital archive for a few months. Now in the stay home situation we're all in, because of a certain virus, I thought it would be nice to update the digital archive with some of the latest additions of my physical collection. However, I just noticed that since I quit Apple Music, loads and loads of my digital files are missing from 'Music'.
I've been searching online for information and went through this discussion: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8354661
Apple has deleted records I bought at Bandcamp, HDTracks, straight from labels, and hundreds if not thousands of files I manually digitised and put into iTunes. (Files that were in Lossless 24 bit quality). Why ?? The chaos is complete: I don't even know what has gone lost. There's just random holes in my collection, everywhere! It has completely messed up my archive which was built over 15 years with the greatest care. It's really unacceptable.
I don't expect a solution from Apple, cause that's obviously not going to happen. But I do want to warn people to not trust on this service! If you, like me, would expect the service to keep original files intact, you are wrong!
I have a Time Machine backup, but even in the history of Time Machine the original hi-res files I put into iTunes are nowhere to be found. As I now think to understand from the above mentioned discussion, that's because Apple doesn't care about your original files. Whatever you throw in 'Music' will be uploaded to the cloud and replaced by the iTunes version of the same song (if available), and this matching isn't all too accurate. iTunes doesn't have distinctions of different masterings of repressings of records etc.
I never expected this service to be perfect for my needs, but I thought it would at least be in-destructive to my library. I just don't understand why it has to remove data from the desktop library, which should be (and IS) the original music library. Instead Apple Music seems to have made a Frankenstein clone in the iCloud and then synced the Frankenstein back over the original library. It's really shady technology.
I'm now following a clue from the above mentioned discussion, that says there is a possibility that you can sync the original files back if you re-subscribe to Apple Music but I don't have my hopes up and also it smells like a dirty hostage scam, to make me sign up again to get my own stuff back.
Be warned out there.
