I believe that’s a common misconception; Apple never, never as far as I know, has ever claimed the iPad Pro to be a PC replacement. Yes, a laptop alternative, but not a replacement. That’s a distinction with a difference.
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Quick anecdote:
As Spotify went online, like 10 years back, I dropped iTunes like a hot potato and didn’t look back. I was also leaving behind some 1.800 purchased tracks - all of which I had carefully curated and chosen as the most vital tracks on the albums I was most into during that period.
Fast forward to 2019 - iTunes is still there, so I exported my Smart Playlist “Purchased tracks” to a TXT file, dropped it into Soundiiz (on a one month plan) and almost all of the tracks are now synced to both my Spotify and Tidal accounts. (Almost all because of licensing and geography and whatnot, but still the majority.)
Many of the artists and albums I had already manually added to my playlists, but it sure is a nice walk down memory lane to put this playlist on shuffle and re-discover those late nights of checking out the 30 second previews before purchase…
So, now we live in the times after WWDC and iTunes has been dumped by Apple in MacOS Catalina.
MacOS Catalina will have several apps to be available instead of iTunes. One thing I worried about is how stuff can be synced to our i-devices using our Macs. The famous @ismh 
wrote a very nice article on his blog:
https://512pixels.net/2019/06/syncing-ipod-macos-catalina/
I wonder if this way it will also be possible to get stuff into third-party iOS apps? Why? Well, for instance last weekend I had to rebuild my ForScore library. I have 1,200 PDFs in this thing and I needed to edit the metadata of all 1,200 files in order to get stuff in order. I decided to do it on my Mac and it worked just great. After that, I wanted to put my stuff back into ForScore. Because of the huge amount of files, I went the iTunes file sharing route. It took me 5 minutes and I was done.
But still, there was this uncomfortable feeling: Would I have been able to accomplish the same using Catalina without having iTunes at my disposal?
That is my big worry. I use iTunes to sync calendars and contacts from my main Mac to all my iOS devices. I use iMazing to add files to Kindle or GoodReader so adding stuff to 3rd party apps is not as big a worry but iMazing does not sync.iCloud is not an option for me and my first attempts at installing CardDAV and CalDAV on our server ended in a terrible mess. I really don’t have the hours to try to get that all working again. It took many hours just to undo the mess it got into when I tried to get it working!
Am I the last person in the world who uses iTunes to transfer files to my iOS devices? The joys of having 2mpbs internet speeds…
(No, that’s not an exaggeration. Yes, it does suck. There’s only two cable/internet providers where I live, and they’re both terrible).
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So everyone - it turns out iTunes is no longer going to be around anymore. With that in mind I am seriously considering reclaiming the massive 50GB that it appears that I am losing to old iTunes backups.
Yet I am still worried about pulling the trigger.
Not sure what to do really?!
One app is going away, but additional replacement apps are coming, plus added functionality in macOS. So I’m not sure what you mean or why you’d want to do something before the update.
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Do you guys think this’ll enable us to add music/content to the “iTunes cloud library” on iOS/iPadOS, now that iTunes is discontinued?
Would seem like a natural evolutionary step considering the advancements on iPad & iPadOS
Back in June the beta allowed you to add and edit song data to iCloud.
Wasn’t it only the MacOS beta that allowed this, or did I miss something?
I’ve been on public beta since day one in regards to iPadOS
Yeah – I get that… But I’m still no wiser about whether I should remove this incredibly large chunk of data that is not really serving any purpose or whether I should remain scared and hang onto it for the sake of it!
If the space is being taken up by old iOS device backups and you’re comfortable with having them not be there anymore then I’d delete them if I were in a situation as to need the space (as long as I had more recent backups). On the other hand, there is no way I’d delete my pre-Apple Music music library backups.