TechCrunch says the new design features some aesthetic changes, such as the re-introduction of the left-hand sidebar. However, its biggest change will be protecting users against random music deletions.
Though there had been some rumblings about poor reconciling of iTunes and Apple Music since the latter launched, the issue once again came to the forefront thanks to a blog post from musician James Pinkstone. Earlier in May, under the headline “Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously,” he explained that after downloading Apple Music, 122 GB of the music on his laptop was deleted. While some of the deleted music could easily be played on Apple Music, some of it was Pinkstone’s own work, which he said was uploaded to Apple Music’s database. Further, he lost alternate or rarer versions of songs, which were replaced on Apple Music with other consumer versions.
After talking with Apple support, he found no resolution to the issue. Apple was so mystified by this error that it sent two technicians to Pinkstone’s house in an attempt to recreate the issue. The techs spent almost an entire day trying to recreate the problem but could not.
Along with the iTunes update, Apple told TechCrunch that there have been an “extremely small number of cases” of the music-deletion problem, and while it has not been able to reproduce the issue, it takes all reports seriously. If users still experience the bug, they are asked to contact AppleCare.
Because Apple has not been able to replicate the issue, TechCrunch says, it’s hard to know exactly what Apple’s “safeguards” are for preventing accidental deletions since they aren’t explained in detail in the report on the update. As Macworld writer Jason Snell showed on Twitter, Apple’s dialog box may be a culprit:
@settern My theory is that this dialog box is causing a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens next. pic.twitter.com/ROYbw1WQzf
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) May 5, 2016
However, in the new update, iTunes 12.4, the dialog box is still present.
