Apple Owns Up to iTunes Music Deletion Issue Promises Fix "Soon"

Apple has confirmed earlier reports that users are seeing their music libraries disappearing from their Macs. At issue was a blog post by a designer named James Pinkstone which quickly made the rounds through the blogosphere and social media.

Pinkstone claimed that Apple Music and iTunes somehow managed to delete up to 122GBs of local music files and basically cause havoc with his library. Now, Apple has confirmed to several sites that it is working on a patch to iTunes to fix the issue. In its statement released earlier today Apple said it is investigating reports of a supposed Apple Music compatibility bug that deletes local music files without user permission, adding that an updated version of the media management software is expected for release next week.

"In an extremely small number of cases users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission," Apple said. "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. 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."

Because Apple has yet to reproduce the issue, we still don't know for sure what caused this mass deletion — whether it's a bug with iTunes, Apple Music or elsewhere. As of right we also do not know if this may have been deliberate behavior on the part of iTunes, Apple Music or the company, but we do not really expect that to be the case (we hope not anyways!).

For now, the best course of action (as always with technology) is to ensure you have complete, recent, data backups of your music library. That way, if something does happen in the interim, you can always rollback files (or your entire library) if stuff ends up missing. We’ll bring more updates on the matter as they are provided.