This blog post says that when you sign up for Apple Music, it will delete tour stored files and make you listen to everything in the cloud. It even copies and then deleted his recordings of his own original compositions.
I have noticed that my iPhone is always trying to trick me into signing up for Apple Music. I have to keep playing with the settings to listen only to what I have actually synced to my device.
I toyed with the idea of “Apple Match,” the precursor to Apple Music but after really figuring out how it was supposed to work decided against it. I had just lost a hard drive and didn’t want to lose all the music I had backed up to another drive, so I looked into Match as a way to store all my stuff in the cloud. Match never deleted anything from my computer, but it never really worked correctly either. I ultimately decided it was both cheaper and much simpler to just have a lot of backup drives.
So, if I (were to become an Apple user) am in some place where the cell towers/wifi do not reach (barefoot ocean cruise on a sailboat in the Gulf of Mexico, deep in the middle of Smokey Mountains National Park camping out, taking a romantic sunset walk on a remote beach in the Pacific NW), I can’t listen to my music?
Only if you tell it you want to exclusively use Apple Music (an entirely different program than just “Music” on your phone). Apple Music is a cloud-based service. Music is just an app that plays songs off your phone (AND off the cloud, should you have any there).
I am not an Apple Music user and I keep running into situations in which the Music app on my iPhone says it can’t play music without getting access to cellular data. Then I have to go onto settings to switch it back.
No. At least, not unless you tell it to. There are for some people advantages to having all their music in the cloud, so you can do it that way if you choose. But I have a lot of memory on my phone, and like to keep my music there, so I have it, both music I have had before Apple Music from purchasing digital files or ripping CDs, and also songs I have downloaded from Apple Music.
I’m not quite wrapping my head around the idea of a ‘primary mac’. Does Apple expect someone to keep a mac forever? I’d imagine that they get swapped or traded often enough (say, giving your kid your old mac when you buy a new one) that this would be a hassle. But I’m not a mac user. Can anyone explain it?
No, because I’ve never heard of it.
Your music purchases are tied to your Apple ID, which is transferable between machines.
iTunes on a Mac is where your music library is managed (assuming your aren’t doing everything on iOS). This library is also transferable when a machine is upgraded. In fact, I’ve done this many times myself. Maybe that’s what you are thinking of.
I suspect this is a misunderstanding (though one encouraged by Apple). Somewhere along the way in the last month or so my iphone suddenly switched me to cloud based music and I thought I had lost all the downloaded music stored on the phone. Actually it was all still there but the settings had changed to make it less visible. I suspect this is the cause of the OP’s story.
This is for people who store their music on a primary machine (say, an iMac) and then have other devices that they want to listen to the music on, without storing it there (say, a MacBook and an iPad and an iPhone). All these devices could be associated with your iTunes/Apple Music account, but only one is the “primary Mac” where you actually keep your MP3s on the HD.
No but they expect that someone who enjoys music may have a large collection. Larger than an iphone or tablet could hold. So their idea is that you have one machine with the entirety of your 40gig music collection or whatever, and then they duplicate it in the cloud and you can stream from the cloud to your phone or tablet. If you decide to trade, swap, throw away or firebomb the computer with the actual files of your music collection, Apple assumes you will proactively move the files you want to keep to your new computer.