Remember James Pinkstone? He’s the designer and music buff who found that 122GB of music had disappeared from his MacBook and one of the people interviewed by iMore’s Serenity Caldwell in an attempt to figure out what was going on. Well, Pinkstone got a visit from two Apple senior software engineers this past Saturday who attempted to find out what caused the music to be deleted.
The engineers, “Tom” and “Ezra”, were sent from California to Pinkstone’s Atlanta home to perform troubleshooting tests with a special version of iTunes that could track issues. The team had Pinkstone reactivate his Apple Music account and go through the iTunes track sync process, all while discussing the process with another group back in California.
After a unsuccessful day of trying to reproduce the issues, the team headed back to California. Pinkstone updated his blog with some details: “One of the things on which Tom, Ezra, and I seemed to agree was that Apple is not off of the hook yet. Their software failed me in a spectacular, destructive way; and since I rang that bell, many people have come forward with similar stories. Some may be a result of user error, but I have a hard time believing all are.”
As an iTunes and iTunes Match user who has never used Apple Music and had the same issue occur, I can personally vouch that not only is it not a problem with Apple Music, but that the problem is probably more widespread than Apple would like to admit. Let’s just hope that like Pinkstone and myself, most users have good backups of their iTunes libraries.
