Apple has released a statement in response to various reports on a bug that deletes songs from the iTunes music library. While Apple recognized an issue may exist in the wild, the company could not replicate the bug in-house. Apple are, however, releasing an update in the upcoming week that will hopefully address the issue by implementing various music protection policies into the music program.
“In an extremely small number of cases users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission. We're taking these reports seriously as we know how important music is to our customers and our teams are focused on identifying the cause,” Apple said in a statement sent to blogs such as iMore and The Loop. “We have not been able to reproduce this issue, however, we're releasing an update to iTunes early next week which includes additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue they should contact AppleCare.”
The songs-getting-deleted-from-iTunes bug first popped up on the blogosphere when a blog post written by Jake Pinkstone, a designer at Vellum, halted its path into obscurity and caught fire on social media. The blog post, which stated that Apple’s system deleted his entire music library without warning him, spawned commentary from various outlets, including Slate and Buzzfeed.
Earlier this week, Serenity Caldwell wrote a blog post for iMore — one of the outlets that received the statement from Apple — contesting Pinkstone’s version of events, stating that Apple Music and iTunes are just not designed to allow this to happen. Kirk McElhearn backed up Caldwell’s sentiment for Macworld, mentioning the fact that Pinkstone wrote the post on his company’s blog.
Caldwell later wrote another article stating that after speaking to various more sources and citing support threads in Apple’s help forums, there could actually be a bug within iTunes itself causing the issue. According to Caldwell, the bug only happens to a select number of users, is rare in the grand scheme of things and is difficult to replicate, a factor Apple which addressed in their afore quoted statement.
