Tag: iCloud

Is Apple ever going to properly address the inevitable, relentless growth of peoples Photos libraries?

I just got a new MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, to replace my 3-year-old MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip. That older machine was fine, but, well… something in my gut just told me that if I was considering dropping two grand (minus some trade-in value) on a new computer manufactured in China, maybe I should do it before the end of 2024.

Anyway… I have the new MacBook Pro, and it’s pretty great. It’s essentially this year’s version of the same machine it’s replacing. The off-the-shelf model with a 14-inch display and a 512 GB SSD, at the same retail price. The upgrades are all in the Apple Silicon SoC: M4 Pro in place of the M1 Pro, with more cores and 50% more memory. A worthy upgrade to an already solid configuration.

I say “solid” because… well, I’d really like to have more disk space. I do a lot of video editing these days, and that requires a lot of storage. The problem is, Apple charges a ludicrous markup for increased disk capacity. And since external SSDs over Thunderbolt 5 are as fast as internal SSDs, I can get a 4 TB external disk for not much more than a meager 512 GB upgrade to Apple’s internal disk. The choice is obvious, even when weighing the convenience factor.

Which finally gets me (almost) to my point. Last night, after I had everything set up on the new Mac (I chose to manually install apps and copy files, so I could control what did and didn’t get moved over from the old Mac), I had over 300 GB of disk space free. This morning I sat down and was surprised to see I only had 180 GB free. What gives?

Well… what gives is the Photos app. I hadn’t even opened it — on purpose, for the exact reason I’m about to describe — but since I had logged into my iCloud account, the Mac “conveniently” automatically downloaded my entire Photos library from iCloud onto the Mac.

Do not want.

On my previous Mac, I had long since shuffled the Photos library off to an external disk. Honestly I never even really use Photos on my Mac, partly because my library is an unwieldy, 120 GB mess of close to 57,000 images¹. But mostly because Apple gives users (almost) no control over how the files are managed on their Macs:

So, basically, you have three options:

Fill up all of the space on your hard drive with your photo library.
Fill up all of the space on your hard drive with your photo library, until your Mac decides you’re running out of space, then let it decide how much space to free up.
Don’t have your photos on your Mac at all.

The default is #2, but it’s a pretty crappy option. Because for your Mac to know how much disk space to keep free, it needs to know how you intend to use it. If I’m not currently working on a video project, I don’t need much space. But if I am, then I can go from needing next to nothing to suddenly needing 200 GB or more of free space. Which means I always want to keep at least 200 GB free, in case I’m about to start on a video project. Once I’m rolling, I don’t want to be distracted with figuring out how to free up space.

Now here’s a twist: since, as I mentioned, external SSDs over Thunderbolt are essentially as fast as an internal SSD, you can easily edit a Final Cut project directly on an external disk. In fact, I do that a lot. But not always. I still want that free space.

Fortunately, Apple does provide a way to put your Photos library on an external disk. It’s easy and it works. But you shouldn’t have to do that.

The thing that really kills me is that it would be so simple for Apple to resolve this issue. All they’d need to do is add a slider to the settings tab from the screenshot above, letting the user set a minimum amount of disk space they want to keep free. Why doesn’t Apple do this? I feel like there’s a very intentional reason. And I think I’d be exasperated if I knew it.

¹ Apple is really to blame for the mushrooming library, too. Their automatic tagging by date and location, and AI-assisted tagging of subjects like individual people, pets, etc., make it so easy to find specific images that there is no incentive to put any effort into culling the junk from your library. Growing libraries lead you to pay for larger iCloud storage allocations to hold them. There’s a reason “Services” is Apple’s fastest growing revenue segment. But all of that aside — whatever, I really am not bothered by it — the one place Apple is completely shitting the bed on all of this is handling on-device storage.

The mysteries of Google Photos and what my videos are teaching its AI

For the past few years I’ve been shooting video, sometimes very long video, on my iPhone, and then transferring it to my Mac for editing.

I have two ways to get the videos to my Mac. I can use AirDrop for a direct device-to-device transfer. But the videos also automatically upload to iCloud in the background, so I can then open the Photos app on my Mac and find them there, and download them from “the cloud.”

Neither way is exceptionally fast, especially with large files, simply because they are large files, but they both have always worked seamlessly, and I can pretty much do them on-demand as soon as the videos are done recording.

Last night I recorded a performance of the big band I play in, using… gasp! …an Android phone. Specifically, a Google Pixel 3a. Yeah, it’s pretty old. But also new to me. I need an Android phone for testing my web development work, but since I don’t use it as my day-to-day phone, I didn’t want to spend a lot. I know the Pixel is a good phone, with a clean Android install, and the price was right ($150). Which is exactly why it’s the phone I chose to shoot the video with, because I was going to have to leave it unattended all night in a crowded auditorium, about 100 feet away from me. It was unlikely to be taken, but I didn’t want to risk it with my main iPhone or even a backup. (Plus, the Pixel actually does shoot pretty good video.)

Anyway… once I got home, I then had to contend with the problem I knew would be waiting for me. This is an Android phone, so there’s no iCloud. But I am also pretty heavily invested in the Google ecosystem, so I figured I’d have no issues transferring the videos to my Google Drive — or at least Google Photos — and get them that way.

There are issues.

First, I can’t find a way to just put them on my Google Drive, which is where I really wanted them. Yes, I can just jump over to photos.google.com instead of drive.google.com, without even having to log back in, but I operate frequently in Google Drive and I had never, before owning this phone, had any reason to even consider the existence of Google Photos. But, whatever.

Second, and I could be wrong about this, it seems like the files only transfer from the device to the cloud when you have the Photos app open on the phone. I have the phone running on my home wifi, which is connected to gigabit fiber, so the transfer should be about as fast as can be expected anywhere in the United States, but even though I left the app open for an extended period last night, it only uploaded one of the two videos. I gave up waiting on it and went to bed, and uploaded the second one this morning.

But here’s the real kicker: neither of the videos is “ready” yet in Google Photos, not even the one I uploaded last night. Maybe it hadn’t quite finished uploading then but still… what exactly is Google doing to get the videos “ready”? Why aren’t they “ready” the instant they’re uploaded?

I get that videos uploaded to YouTube need to go through some processing. YouTube does all kinds of crazy crap to videos. Some of it is transcoding and optimizing the files for streaming, which… yes. 100%. Please do that. Some of it is machine learning (a.k.a. “AI”) driven, analyzing the content to make smart chapters and such, as well as detecting content that is illegal or violates terms of use. I see the benefits. And some of it is for the benefit of corporate overlords, both at Alphabet and elsewhere, such as detecting copyrighted music. Well… honestly there are pros and cons to that. But it’s not the point of this post.

The point is, I get why that kind of processing is happening to YouTube videos. But none of it should be happening to private videos uploaded to your Google Photos account. I suppose I should give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume that it’s strictly doing the AI scans for illegal content. (I think you know the illegal content I am talking about so I am not going to spell it out.)

Apple’s recent efforts to implement technology to do on-device detection of that type of content recently got a lot of heat for its privacy implications — even though on-device scanning is far more private than in-the-cloud scanning. But Apple always takes the heat for things because it’s Apple, despite Google, Amazon and Facebook engaging in much more egregious versions of those things.

The thing about Google in particular is, they’re all about amassing TOTAL WORLD KNOWLEDGE. Not in an inherently nefarious way (although maybe there’s no way for that not to be inherently nefarious). But there are always nefarious implications in what they’re doing. So whatever is going on as I’m waiting for my videos to be “ready,” the one thing I know for sure is that Google’s AI is learning something from them.

Update: I realized after I posted this that maybe I should… uh… google it. Yes, Apple themselves have provided instructions on how to transfer photos and video from Android to Mac. I realized that I could maybe use this USB-C to USB-C cable I have sitting right here at my desk to make a file transfer!

iCloud Drive: Don’t do what I did!

Being deeply immersed in the Apple ecosystem, a couple of years ago I made a decision:

I’ll move all of my work files onto iCloud Drive!

I work (as in, write code and edit image files) mainly on my Mac. But I was seduced by the possibility of accessing all of my work files in a pinch on my iPad (which I still had at the time) or even my iPhone. Plus, since my files would be in “The Cloud”, I could even access them from another computer (or from my Mac when booted into Windows) if I needed to, by logging into my iCloud account from a web browser.

It seemed… so obvious. So perfect.

Umm… maybe not.

For the past two years, I have been constantly fighting with iCloud Drive. One of its signature features is that it can manage disk use on your Mac automatically, so as your hard drive fills up, it deletes files you haven’t used in a while, keeping them safely in the cloud while freeing up disk space on your Mac. And with my MacBook Pro sporting a (meager?) 256 GB hard drive, with 40-odd GB allocated for a Windows partition, and over 60 GB occupied by Logic Pro X sound samples, my drive is filling up constantly.

While this is great in principle, it is completely unworkable in practice for three interrelated reasons:

If you have a large amount of data in play here (for me, it’s in the vicinity of 100 GB), iCloud Drive may get to a point where it is constantly transferring data. If you’re not on a gigabit fiber connection, this can both use up all of your Internet bandwidth and take ages.
Because #1 is taking place constantly, if you do find yourself needing to grab one of those files that has been deleted locally (as indicated in the Finder by a cloud icon with a down-pointing arrow), you may find yourself waiting several minutes for the file to become available, even if it’s small (as in, under 1 MB).
In an effort to make this all appear seamless to the user, the Finder represents cloud-only files as… regular files. But they’re actually just pointers with a hidden .icloud filename extension… as you’ll find if you ever try to perform Finder actions inside another program, such as syncing files to a web server using Transmit.

All of this might be tolerable if Apple gave you any control whatsoever over which files get deleted locally. But they don’t.

It gets worse.

What’s worse than getting stuck in this situation? Trying to get out of it. It’s like quicksand… the more you struggle against it, the faster and deeper you sink into it.

I made the decision earlier this week to extricate myself from the iCloud Drive nightmare, by buying a 250 GB SanDisk external SSD. First off, a little unpaid plug for this drive… it is awesome. It’s super light and small, seemingly at least as fast as the internal SSD in my MacBook Pro (in that I am able to transfer multiple gigabytes of data in seconds), and it even looks cool. I’m going to be using it all the time, so I’m actually considering putting adhesive Velcro on both it and the top of my MacBook Pro so I can keep it permanently attached. (Which says a lot about how much my regard for Apple has fallen lately — in the past I would never have sullied the exterior of an Apple laptop with something adhesive.)

So anyway, external SSD acquired, my goal was to start transferring my files from iCloud Drive over to the SSD.

Uh… good luck with that.

Because I’m now at a point where I have more than double the amount of data stored on iCloud Drive as I have available space locally, a majority of my files are now only in “The Cloud.” Ugh. Which means waiting for all of that data transfer stuff to happen. If only I could, somehow, bypass this broken process, I thought.

There has to be a way.

tl;dr Nope.

So, here’s the thing. I’ve been using iCloud Drive for the bulk of my cloud-based file storage, but I do use other services as well. I have Google Drive. I have Dropbox. I know how they work.

Specifically, I know that you can, y’know, like, select a folder and download the entire thing as a zip file.

So I thought to myself, I’ll just go to iCloud in a web browser and do that! Download the whole friggin’ thing as a big zip file, or maybe a few zip files, and be done with it.

Nope.

For whatever reason, iCloud doesn’t let you do that. Probably because of the whole seamless “It just works” Kool-Aid drinking song everyone in Apple land has been singing. (Myself included, mostly.)

You can only download individual files, not folders, from the iCloud web interface. It does let you select multiple files at once, but only within one folder.

Check out this delightful thread full of know-it-all asshats whose response to a legitimate question — why doesn’t Apple allow this thing that every competing service does? — is to challenge the validity of the question and the intelligence of the questioner. (That thread is now closed so I’ve just opened my own new thread on the topic. Watch this space for trolls!)

There. Are. Plenty. Of. Reasons. A. Person. Might. Have. For. Needing. To. Do. Something. That. You. Have. Not. Previously. Considered. Stop challenging their premises and answer their question, or shut the hell up.

Whew.

I ended up “solving” the problem by resigning myself to the fact that it wouldn’t be completely solved. So instead I took the drastic approach of temporarily logging out of iCloud completely, just so I could strand the files I did have saved locally, and copied them to the SSD.

Then I logged back into iCloud Drive and tried to get it to stop syncing my files by unchecking the Desktop and Documents Folders option.

The only problem is, I didn’t have my work files in those folders. I had them in a separate top-level folder in the iCloud Drive that I created myself. Because, you know, you can do that and it didn’t seem like a crazy idea or anything.

It was.

I discovered this morning that even though I had done all of this and tried to purge the nightmare of constant iCloud Drive syncing from my Mac life, once I had logged back into iCloud, the Mac went right back to quietly, constantly, syncing that iCloud Drive data on my Mac. As I type this, I have a Finder window open to my iCloud Drive and in the status bar it says “downloading 120,079 items (36.14 GB of 48.66 GB)”. Fun!

So, my new plan for today is to watch that window, and as the little cloud icons next to individual folders goes away, I’m copying those folders to my SSD and then deleting them from iCloud. My assumption is that as I do this, I am freeing up more local space and iCloud will continue to download the remaining items, and eventually I’ll have everything transferred over.

But please… do yourself a favor and don’t do what I did. iCloud Drive is not suitable for professional use.

How to get iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) apps to stop defaulting to iCloud when saving

Ever since I semi-fully embraced iCloud, I’ve found that the iWork apps — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — always default to wanting to save every new document in iCloud, which I never — well, OK, almost never — want to do. It’s fine that it’s an option, but I want the default to be saving to my local hard drive (which, actually, means saving to my Dropbox account).

It didn’t take much effort to find this thread on Apple’s support forums, but the first suggested solution — turning off “Documents and Data” in System Preferences → iCloud — seemed draconian. With this option you can never sync your documents to iCloud.

A little further down the thread I found the “real” solution, courtesy of “Bernie_uk”, which was important enough for me to want to share here.

It requires opening up Terminal, but it’s not too scary. You just have to run this command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

This command doesn’t turn off anything in iCloud; it just tells the system that your default should be saving files to disk, not to iCloud. Note that since this is a global setting, it will affect not just iWork, but any other apps that use iCloud’s “Documents and Data” syncing. (I guess.)

New adventures in hi-fi… er, iTunes Match

As successful as iTunes has been in transforming both the music industry and the music listening experience, it has, from the beginning, been hamstrung by restrictions imposed by the outmoded, fearful major record labels.

Little by little, Apple has whittled away at those restrictions while managing to create a hugely successful business — iTunes has for several years been the largest music retailer in the world. First there was iTunes Plus: a boost in quality and a victory for users with the elimination of DRM copy restrictions. And now we have the real game changer: iTunes Match.

For $25 per year, you can now store your music “in the cloud.” iCloud, to be specific. That annual subscription allows you to create a centralized, comprehensive library of all of your digital music on Apple’s servers, and accessible from any of your computers and iOS devices. No more worrying about limited disk space or struggling with syncing issues. It just works.

In principle.

In practice? Well, I put iTunes Match to the test today. My music library poses a few unique challenges to this new service:

My library consists of over 18,000 songs, and more than 140 GB of data.
My main computer is a MacBook Air with a 128 GB hard drive, so I keep a “master” library on an external hard drive and a day-to-day library on the internal hard drive.
My main iOS device is a 32 GB iPhone 4, which has been syncing with the “day-to-day” iTunes library on my Mac’s internal hard drive.
SLP and I have our own iTunes accounts but have long desired to have a single shared music library.
My music library consists mostly of non-iTunes Plus tracks: a mix of DRM-laden 128 kbps iTunes tracks, ripped CDs, and tons of MP3s downloaded from Amazon.com.

With these factors in play, I had some specific goals for iTunes Match, roughly in this order:

Move my “master” library from an external hard drive that sits on my desk, into iCloud where all of our devices can access it.
Free up precious storage space on my MacBook Air and iPhone.
Upgrade old DRMed 128 kbps iTunes tracks to higher-quality, DRM-free, 256 kbps versions.
Consolidate SLP’s purchased iTunes music (around 600 songs) with my main library.
Clean up duplicate tracks.

Spoiler alert: I pretty much knew going into it that the last of those items was going to get worse before it got better. But there were still plenty of surprises (good, bad and ugly) along the way.

The journey of 1,000 miles (or 18,000 songs) begins with a single step

I began my iTunes Match journey about two weeks ago, as soon as iTunes Match became available to the public. (For what it’s worth, I’m registered as an iOS developer, so I had access to the beta, but was never able to get it working properly.) The first goal was to get all of my music loaded into the system, and for the most part that went fine. Which is to say, it went… and went… and went… and w…e…n…t… fine. Loading the 4,000 or so songs I kept on my internal hard drive was fairly inconsequential. The process completed in a couple of hours while I went about my work that day. But then when the time came to fire up the external drive and load the remaining 14,000 or so songs… hmm. How can I put this? I guess the plus side was that I could leave it unattended and sleep, because it took three nights (overnight) to finish.

At that point I left things alone for a while, as I was too busy at the time to devote an entire day to organizing and cleaning up my music library. I did, however, get to play around with the overall iTunes Match experience for a week or so, and I discovered the following:

The good:

Having my complete music library at my fingertips on any device is amazing.
Streaming works great on the Mac, iPhone and Apple TV. Just pick a song and within a few seconds it starts playing.

The bad:

Browsing can be slow, sometimes painfully so, with a large library. This is especially a problem on the iPhone.
Cover art is often missing. I haven’t yet determined if it’s just not being downloaded, or if it’s not attached to the albums in iCloud, either.

The ugly:

Syncing an iOS device with iTunes on your computer can become a real mess. It’s hard to delete anything: like Michael Myers, no matter how many times you shoot him or stab him or stick a hanger in his eye, he just keeps getting up and coming back to get you. OK, bad analogy. But it almost feels that way.
Sometimes you don’t really want to remember just how many songs by Edison Lighthouse, England Dan and John Ford Coley, or Peppermint Trolley Company you own. It would be nice to have more filtering options than: a) just what’s on your device, or b) the whole shebang.

The big day arrives

Today I finally decided that I could afford to put off almost all of my real work for an entire day and devote my attention singularly to the task of getting iTunes Match fully synced, and SLP’s music fully integrated into the main library. To be honest, however, it’s not just today. I began the process at around 8:00 last night, worked until just after midnight, resumed from 7:00 to 8:30 this morning, then worked on it straight from 10:30 AM to 3:30 PM and again from about 7 PM to 10 PM, when I began writing this post. That’s 13 1/2 hours total, or approximately 2.66 seconds per each of the 18,266 tracks in my library. YMMV, as they say, but I’d guess it’s reasonable, if you’re trying to budget some time, to assume that you’ll need about 3 seconds times the number of tracks in your library. (And I’m still not really done.)

I took some notes today as I was going about things. Here are some pertinent observations:

Some things were just plain gone. I’m pretty sure this was the fault of my own carelessness in keeping my various pre-iTunes Match libraries in sync, but it’s worth noting that two conspicuous omissions in my library were The King Is Dead by The Decemberists and The King of Limbs by Radiohead. Coincidence?! I think… well, actually, yes, I do think it was probably just a coincidence. Luckily I was able to track down backups of both of those albums, but now I wonder what else is missing that I’m forgetting about.

“Matched” tracks are hit-and-miss. I’m sure Apple is relying on some very powerful algorithms to analyze each track in your library, in order to determine whether or not it matches a track that already exists on iTunes. It’s clearly not just relying on title-and-artist matching like the longstanding (and semi-useless) “Display Duplicates” option. One of the big selling points of iTunes Match is that if your music is available on iTunes, even if you didn’t buy it there, you’ll get the (usually higher-quality) iTunes version instead of the original version in your library, saving you time and saving Apple server space, as well. (Macworld’s Jason Snell has written an excellent tutorial on how to upgrade your tracks.)

The algorithms aren’t perfect, however, and I was annoyed to discover numerous cases where all but one or two tracks of an album were “matched” and could be replaced with 256 kbps iTunes versions, but the other tracks were rejected, for reasons unknown, and were stuck with the inferior quality versions I had to begin with.

Duplicates are a mess. Apple has done a lot to try to make it easy for you to find and weed out duplicate tracks, but you still have to do it. I appreciate that they don’t just assume which tracks you will or won’t want and automatically delete things capriciously, but I still wish there were a more efficient way to trim the excess.

Cloud symbols and error messages could use some clarification. Neven Mrgan has a great summary of the icons and his interpretations of their meanings, but I encountered too many dialog boxes today with useless statements like “This item is not eligible for iCloud” or “The track could not be downloaded because an unknown error occurred.”

If you’re trying to consolidate tracks from two separate iTunes accounts into a single library, you’re on your own. While the 10-device limit on DRMed iTunes tracks, and iTunes’ ability to be authorized for multiple accounts on a single device, allows for this kind of consolidation, Apple has not gone out of its way to support such activities. In my situation, I was dealing with a large number of SLP’s iTunes purchases that were no longer on any of our devices. I happened to have a spare Mac in my office with an empty iTunes library, so I logged into SLP’s iTunes account on that Mac and used the “Purchased” link in the iTunes Store to re-download all of her music in prep for eventual syncing with the main library.

But it wasn’t that easy. At first, a bunch of the songs wouldn’t download. I realized it was because they were still DRM versions, and that I needed to pay another $25 for an iTunes Match subscription on SLP’s iTunes account to get them. Even then, there were a number of weird issues with tracks being unavailable. Strangely, it seemed that in some cases, if I already had some of those tracks in the master iTunes library, and had already downloaded 256 kbps versions of them, it would not allow me to download them on this second computer. This leads me to believe that there is some hidden mechanism whereby Apple does still keep track of even the DRM-free tracks that have been downloaded, and if they’ve been “transferred” (as it were) to another user’s library, they become unavailable to the original user. This is just a guess, but it seems to fit my experience. (On a related side note, since this second computer was not yet authorized with SLP’s iTunes account, I needed to authorize it — which was triggered by attempting to play a song — before iTunes Match would work properly.)

What if your music is no longer available in the iTunes store? I’m sure this is one of the most commonly asked questions about iTunes Match, and I’m sure Apple has given very reassuring scripted answers, but it still remains as perhaps the biggest risk you take in trusting your music to the cloud. Tracks that iTunes fails to match and has to upload should be no problem, but once you’re relying solely on a “matched” track — or, for that matter, a “purchased” or “protected” track — you’re at the mercy of Apple and the record labels keeping the music available. I initially noted this as merely a point to ponder, but during the process of integrating libraries I encountered the problem firsthand. SLP had an album that was DRMed 128 kbps, but which is no longer available in the iTunes Store, at all. Luckily I had it copied to my master library already, or I wouldn’t have even known it existed. As it was, I was stuck with an album of low audio quality and that iTunes refused to load into iTunes Match. (It was “ineligible.”)

I hit upon a hokey workaround solution, one that is flawed mainly in that it results in further compression/degradation of the sound quality of the tracks, but at least it’s a way to get the music into iTunes Match. I burned a CD of the album, then re-ripped that CD back into iTunes, DRM free. (That’s the old school way of circumventing iTunes DRM, circa 2004.) It worked, but of course I’ll always know that the sound quality is sub-128 kbps. (Not that it matters much to me, as it’s an album I’ll probably never listen to.) This led me to a related discovery…

Burning a CD of DRMed tracks, re-ripping it, and uploading the results to iTunes Match will not get you “matched” DRM-free 256 kbps versions. Granted, my sample size here is pretty small — two tracks — but I suspect this is deliberate (if it’s possible). In addition to the aforementioned unavailable album, I found two other tracks from SLP’s library that stubbornly refused to load into iTunes Match, even though the rest of the tracks from the albums they were on were recognized and “matched” with no problem. So I burned them onto a CD, re-ripped the CD, and loaded the tracks into iTunes Match. No match. Just the further-compressed versions based on the original DRMed 128 kbps tracks.

Corrupted files? Are you kidding me? I had been wondering what might happen if files got corrupted, either during upload or download. Unfortunately, I found out. Just another meaningless error message with no real indication of a solution. I’m a few thousand tracks into the “upgrade” process so far, and to this point I’ve had four songs fail to download due to an “unknown error.” The behavior is the same in most cases: the song appears to download several times in quick succession. As soon as the progress bar gets to the end, it starts over again. After maybe 5 attempts, it stops with an error number (sometimes err = -100000, sometimes err = 11111). I think it may be necessary to contact iTunes customer support to resolve the issue, but I want to wait until I’ve finished downloading all of my music, to see if it happens with any other songs first.

So, is it all worth it?

I still have a nagging fear that some kind of catastrophic data loss is just around the corner, but so far I am inclined to say that iTunes Match definitely is worth it. It was delayed by a few weeks and still seems like it may have been rushed out the door, but I am hopeful that most of the current glitches and usability issues will be resolved over time. It would be nice if it “just worked,” as we Apple fanbois are so frequently inclined to say, but knowing the complexity of the task at hand, it’s a nearly superhuman achievement, even flawed as it is today.

At the moment I still have almost 3000 low-quality tracks that are eligible for an upgrade (using Jason Snell’s smart playlists), not to mention countless duplicates to weed out and a few other stray errors (in my nightmares, clouds have exclamation points) to contend with. But I think the biggest testament to the magnitude of Apple’s accomplishment is that it’s actually gotten me excited about “the cloud,” something I’ve looked upon disdainfully for years.