Apple engineers visit user's place to know why iTunes deleted his music

Apple engineers fail to reproduce the iTunes music deletion bug, following several customer complaints.

Apple has flown two engineers from across the US to James Pinkstone's house as his viral blog post started spreading the news of iTunes app inadvertently deleting music from some personal libraries.

The company reportedly took this decision with the intent of identifying the root cause of the issue wherein Apple Music and iTunes Match had allegedly deleted 122GB of Pinkstone's personal music collection.

Pinkstone explains in his blog that the two engineers Tom and Ezra connected an external drive to his laptop and used a diagnostic version of the iTunes to collect system logs and error reports from his affected device.

Here are a few excerpts from his blog post:

If something did go wrong, though, this version of iTunes would document what happened in more detail than the consumer version could. As one of the first steps in our experiment, I signed back up for Apple Music under Tom and Ezra's supervision. They conference called with several other engineers in California, talking through their actions and discussing next steps.

Quite strangely, it is confirmed that the engineers were unable to reproduce the issue on the device despite spending the whole day researching on it. However, Apple's dedication towards identifying and resolving an end-user problem surely stands out as a welcome gesture.

An Apple spokesperson had reportedly acknowledged the issue while also promising a fix with forthcoming iTunes updates as the news went viral on the internet. Consequently, Apple has promptly rolled out a new iTunes 12.4 update with some fix for the music deletion bug.

"Apple may be a huge corporation, and I'll never see most of what's behind the curtain—but this Senior Engineer, who sat petting my dog and discussing Breaking Bad, was just some guy doing his best," explains Pinkstone.

The user interface in iTunes 12.4 has apparently undergone minor design improvements to make the interface more user-friendly and less ambiguous.

Improved navigation with back and forward buttons, enhanced media picker interface, new drag and drop capability with custom playlists, new Library views, and refreshed Sidebar are a few of the useful additions made into iTunes 12.4.

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