Worrying thing happened to me this past Friday. My phone was set to low battery. It was sitting in my truck unused for 4 hours unplugged. I happened to go back to the truck for something maybe about two hours in and half spied a message on the screen which I ignored because I was busy. Got into the truck ready to drive off and naturally plugged the phone back in to charge. Only, it wouldn’t. Well, I had an hours round trip ahead of me before barbecue and beer so I reasoned that surely it would wake up in that amount of time and I would have to deal with the sound of nature for my music fix whilst driving. Nope.
The thing was still as dead as a Dodo when I got back to the yard. Shit! Everything is on this little motherfucker. Everything. Luckily I still had the wall plugin with me. Plugged it into a mains and intentionally forgot about it for a couple of hours. Came back to life but my entire music Downloads for ‘YouTube Music’ of which I pay a premium every month for had entirely disappeared except for something they had cobbled together from my listening data. There’s no one to complain to though. It’s impossible (hard) intentionally to be able to directly talk with a human about issues and I understand why that would just be impractical but still, there it is. Gone . Good job I’ve got a good memory.
Can I be the first to ask, did you try turning it off and on again?
Yes you can and you are and that’s not the point is it. Especially when then that doesn’t work either. The other fucking point I’d like to fucking point out, is that every month they subtract $13 from my account.
Too soon?
If I’m to keep my sanity whilst still retaining my anger I’m going first with Paul and then with John.
I’ve just popped in to say “Buy a Fiio”.
I’ll have to look that up,but thanks.
I’m so mad though because I built up a library and to have it disappear overnight without any explanation or accountability is frustrating in the extreme. I’m thinking of going old school again and just buying the hard copy and making up my own mixes.
What did the message say?
I never bothered to look properly because I was busy.
I’m only a half spy. I’m hoping for a promotion to full spy soon. 🦹♀️
Er…it was your own phone, you’re allowed to look at it. The message will still be there somewhere. Presumably it said, ‘You need to do something fast because we’re about to delete all your music.’
I don’t use it much, but I have Amazon Prime, and it gives me a streaming service. Anytime I download anything, I put it on my SD card rather than my phone. I assume that if I ever dump Prime, the music will still be on the card.
It might be still on the card, but I don’t think you’d be able to play it. With this kind of thing there’s normally something built into the file that will check you’re a legit user before granting access. A software engineer will be able to explain this approximately four thousand times better than I can.
I hear what you’re saying. Does that mean that Amazon is putting software on my phone that I don’t want, without my knowledge?
Sort of. Downloads from subscription services like Spotify or Amazon books will have digital rights management built in. This prevents them being copied and distributed. People who have upset Amazon – for example caught buying e-books from the US site but living elsewhere – have found their entire libraries removed.
AFAIK MP3 downloads from Amazon are DRM free. I’m sure someone else here will know.
Purchased Amazon MP3 files, or the ones you get when you buy a CD/vinyl, are DRM-free and yours to keep. You’ve paid for them.
AFAIK, the ones you get from Amazon Music streaming service are rented. Stop paying the monthly fee, stop being able to play your downloads.
Exactly, Spotify and Amazon are the same. You can download stuff to play offline but if you browse to the actual downloads using a file browser instead of the relevant app, they’re unplayable. This doesn’t mean that any software has been put on your phone without permission because it’s all dealt with by the app…. also, they’re not mp3 files because if they were they’d be clear. (I think Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis files which kind of makes sense because it was always intended as a format that could hold more than one bit rate in a single file)
What’s a phone?
Exactly. 🤔🙀👐💀👻👿🤖
Good Lord. H. P.
I’m pleased to see him, too, but I’m pretty sure he’s not the Good Lord, @Beezer 😉
Horrid things. They ring and, if you answer it, people expect you to talk to them. Apparently there are now some you can take with you when you leave the house. How will we ever get any peace?
You’re much safer in here.
Wise words.
That’s what the ‘Do not disturb’ function is for. Combined with having the ring tone and/or notifications on silent, it means i can go out and about and rarely be bothered with my phone needing to be used as a phone!
I’ve found a new way of annoying people a lot younger than me. Ring em up instead of texting. They have the vapours, think someone has died.
As good a place as any to see how the Simsian (Simsian?) users are getting on. As an i-tunes tolerator, they this week have decided to dump all the personally imported files from “my” i-tunes library: from 54k+ tracks to 214 was a bit of a shock to discover, they leaving me with all the shite apple downloads my dter bought years ago and that I “can’t” delete, however hard I try. The 54k files were still on the computer, praise be, but now in a harder to find file simply called music. And they play, if I can be arsed to open them up all over with i-tunes. So, not sure if I can, and, given the jury was halfway out last time it came up, how is it proving?
I use a macbook otherwise I would have stayed with the media monkey that managed my long dead PC. Why have media monkey never gone mac?
1 Never update anything unless everything is broken
2 Never under any circumstances open an Apple or Amazon “account”
3 Never pay for anything of no material substance (what are you, crazy?)
4 Back it up (N. Lofgren)
5) Buy records, CDs and tapes.
6) Er, that’s it.
Indeed. I’d like to see YT come round and ‘delete’ my music. They’d need a lorry.
Mrs. Breakfast’s addenda are, as ever, worth holding on to. But you should have done all that thing-buying decades ago.
7) Back up your backup too, just in case.
Why wouldn’t you open an Apple or Amazon account? I have both, he says, oblivious to any problems he might be causing himself.. …
Because they open Portals for the Old Gods beyond the dimensions we know, Arthur.
Thanks, old fruit.
So, as I were saying, how are the Swinson (is that it?) novitiates getting on?
I’m either excited or scared or both.