Well. That was a waste of time (or, "Levan Polkka FOREVER!!1!")

[furtech]

I have an eclectic iTunes/music library (to say the least). When I recently upgraded to the latest version of iTunes, certain songs (all purchased from the iTunes Store) stopped playing. Actually, a lot of them. It was to the point that the only songs that would still play were the "Levan Polkka" and the Muppet Show's "Mahna Mahna" song.

I had planned a weekend of cleaning up files other grunt work at the computer while listening to my music collection. Instead, I spent far too much time googling solutions to this problem (there are a lot of them) and trying the usual range of "fixes" (from re-installing everything to witch-doctor-stuff to caveman banging-on-stuff solutions). Hearing the Levan Polkka for the twenty-third time will do that to you*.

Got my call-back from Apple Tech: solution=delete songs from library (which had my internal caveman-tech running in frightened circles). Then (and only then) will the cloud icon appear (magically, appealing to the witch-doctor-tech inside my head) and you can click to re-download the song with no problem.

My theory is that Apple did this on purpose (file corrupting) so that you -had- to do this process and experience the wonderfulness of The Cloud. But Apple wouldn't do this, would they? They are Pure... and Good! Please, Apple, don't become evil!

But the end result is more dogwalks than intended and my music is back and I am slightly less insane.



*It's a Finnish folk song sung by Loituma, popular in anime circles because of an anime meme a few years ago (involving a spinning leek). Quite catchy, but it will drive you mad if played long enough.

Comments

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

>:( All I know is that Itunes fucked up my Ipad and Ipod recently. Rather unhappy with Apple right now.

I did upgrade to the latest Itunes, but my purchased songs are still working, as far as I know.

[skorzy.livejournal.com]

In the past when this happened to me, it was a matter of manually de-authenticating the computer from iTunes, then manually re-authenticating. All iTunes-purchased music was then playable again.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

That was one of the fixes that I tried early on with no luck.

One of the Apple Express techs flipped a switch at iTunes and allowed me to re-download all of my purchased (which it is doing presently-- long download because of TV and audiobooks). One thing I noticed was that there were a number of files he couldn't re-authorize for download because they had changed or had been removed from iTunes: coincidentally, all of them were songs that could still be played. My current theory is that the new iCloud thing they just started f*cked something up with the permissions somewhere. Oh, and most of the missing/corrupted files were grouped by artist or album-- if one song on an album didn't play, none of them would. And the album artwork had disappeared. FYI.

[shoka.livejournal.com]

101 reasons I stopped upgrading my ipod touch's o/s and iTunes. Not that I have like more than 3 songs purchased through them, preferring Amazon and my own ripped cds.

[iisaw.livejournal.com]

Wait... so there are still things you paid for but you can no longer download? When do you get your refund?

Cloud computing is evil and foolish. A recipe for endless, frustrating disasters at best and totalitarian control at worst.* But iTunes doesn't give you a choice, does it?

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* Not to mention clogging bandwidth unnecessarily.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Oh, there was never a doubt that I paid for them and would get them back/get access back. It was figuring out -how- to get that access back. Somehow some permissions got corrupted or somesuch.

The tech flipped the switch that allowed me to re-download anything/everything. For some odd reason, the ones he -couldn't- flip the switch for (they had changed or were no longer available on iTunes), were all files that played just fine on my computer. Not sure if I could get a refund if they weren't available and I needed them...

Also, apparently I -could- take any songs that were ported to my iPods and port them back again. But I have different things on three different ipods, so I'm really glad I didn't have to try that.

[iisaw.livejournal.com]

Sounds nightmarish!

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

Totally agreed on the cloud computing.

Apple... evil?? nawwwwww...

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

They licensed mac clones, springing up an industry that did so well that they shut it down very shortly thereafter!

They sad .mac would be free and then started charging!

They still have good designs, but lousy hardware integrity!

They move as fast as possible to get you to stop using what you bought 6 months ago and get the newest thing, because of course no one wants backward compatibility!

ad infinitum!

:> (I do like some aspects of macs, actually, but those things are VERY memorable)

[oats-a-plenty.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. Hmmmm. Legitimate corruption or some sort of marketing ploy to see the i-cloud in action. I'll take the latter.