Steve Jobs Ruined My Thanksgiving

I've read about this happening to other people, and there is a fix. Sorry, I dont remember what it is, but you should google around a bit. I know there's a much easier way to fix it than either of your solutions.

I "googled" and "yahood" around and couldn't find much on the subject. I likely used the wrong words, but there are a lot of way to describe how screwed up this is, so I probably picked the wrong words. :-(

And if this is a known problem, how come I was still able to download a broken version as recently as two days ago? That's pretty irresponsible.

I am sorry you are suffering like this. I am using IT 6 for a while on my network now, and since 4.x never had real problems. But, on occasion (i have the music on a network server) i needed to tell iTunes that the music is somewhere else...

The easiest thing should be (assuming there is no meta data in your current .xml file that you care about) is to rescan the library location. Just tell iTunes that the library is now "here", it will create a spanking new one that's blank, and then point it back to the old location. That should rescan the whole folder and subdirs and get you a brand new .xml file that works.

You will loose ratings etc, asssuming you care.

Frank

Yeah, I do care. I've rated about 2,000 tracks and use those ratings to help populate my iPod.

Hmm.

I think part of the problem is that you completely skipped version 5. It's very possible that iTunes 5 modifies your library upon upgrade and when iTunes 6 is upgraded to it makes modifications to those modifications. So since those modifications that iTunes 5 was supposed to put in weren't there the upgrade to iTunes 6 didn't go as expected.

So a possible fix is to pull back in one of your pre-upgrade backups and upgrade to 5 then 6.

I thought about that, but I have no idea where to get iTunes 5. Apple seems to make only one version available:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

I don't see a way to select an older version. Do you?

I don't see an obvious way, but I'm looking, what OS do you have? Cause if I can get a copy of it but for the wrong OS it would be useless. I'll start looking.

I feel your pain having gone through a similar debacle. I have a MP3 collection that I have been expanding for about 10 years. There are about 25,000 songs which I keep on a dedicated external 200GB firewire drive.

Whenever I chose to let iTunes manage my collection it would fuck shit up. So I just set my music directory to the external drive and organize the files myself. This way you are free from the tyrrany that is iTunes mp3 collection management. This way I haven't lost any mp3s. Nothing has been renamed to something stupid, etc.

I'd suggest a similar setup, it's really not any extra work when iTunes isn't managing things, assuming you have all your music in some type of useful directory structure. Also you can sleep at night. $0.02

The file "iTunes Music Library.xml" is read-only. Edits you make to this file will not be incorporated into the iTunes database, and in fact will be overwritten when the iTunes database ("iTunes Library.itl") is changed.

You can take a copy of this file to keep your ratings data safe. I would also export the library to a tab delimited text file. Right Click the library in the sources list, Export Song List. This format might be easier to access from a script.

If you use Frank's suggested hack, your script could use the iTunes COM interface [1] to re-apply the metadata. It would have to look up the old values from the exported file. Use the iTunes COM interface [1]. Unfortunately IITrack.Location is a read-only property in this interface, otherwise your task would be much easier!

I sometimes have this problem when the files exist on a removable drive that has changed drive letters. Are the 'lost' files in the same folder as the remembered tracks? Were there any path / drive letter changes? iTunes will find the file when it returns to the original location, although frustratingly its UI won't tell you where it expects the track to be beforehand.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/sdk/itunescomsdk.html

I don't mind him saying 'fuck'. It's juvenile, but hey, you're allowed to
make an ass of yourself in public. Just read Winer's blog for a couple
of days.

What's pathetic is him asking Jobs for an apology. Now that's pathetic
AND juvenile. It's a two-fer. Hey, Jeremy, I'd like a pony for
Christmas. See what you can do about that after Steve calls you.

I've been burned by iTunes, once. Now I back-up my music before
upgrading. It's a drag, but I'm all grow'd up now and software
frequently lets you down.

Hey, that sucks about your nano! I don't get how apple could do that... maybe it's a problem directly related to your iPod, music, or computer.

The link from www.getfirefox.com said you needed Gmail Invites. I can give you some. What's your e-mail address (e-mail me)?

If you're going to post a call for help, it might be useful to specify what platform you're running on, and to ask for help earlier rather than letting it ruin your day. The worst that can happen is that you look like an idiot for begging for help and then you find the solution right away. In fact, that usually happens, it's such a regular thing that I created another of Murphy's Laws, I call it The Idiots Law: "Whenever you ask for tech help in a public forum, the problem suddenly resolves itself in a way that makes you look like an idiot for not figuring it out yourself."

Anyway.. there are ways to recover your library on OS X, I don't know about Windows. There's a tip on MacOSXHints.com about how to reconnect your library with the files without having to point at each individual file, as well as tips for chunking through your iTunes XML files with Python. I leave it to you, Mr. Search, to locate the appropriate tips on that website, if appropriate for your platform.

Sorry to spoil the fun, but I'm nuking comments about my usage of the word "fuck." Please find somewhere else to discuss that bit of trivia.

I put a disclaimer on this message clearly advertising it as a rant. What the fuck did you expect?

Charles:

If I was going to post a call for help, I'd have asked for help.

This is a rant. You're confusing the two.

But since you asked, I'm running iTunes on Windows XP Pro with all the latest patches applied.

Thanks for the pointer, I'll have a look. As I noted earlier in the comments, searching failed me before. I suspect that was a result of me describing the problem(s) differently than others who might have documented them. Search sucks that way, doesn't it? It's so literal.

Oh my god, this is so heinously simple to fix, especially if you don't necessarily care about the meta-data, like playcounts and such.

1.) Move all the MP3s into one location outside the iTunes folder
2.) Delete all the MP3s from within iTunes (it'll delete all the meta-data without deleting the files themselves because they're no longer where they're expected to be).
3.) Make sure the "keep my tunes organized" option is checked
4.) Drag the folder you put the MP3s into in step 1 onto iTunes, it will happily churn across every MP3 in there and re-add it into your library

Finis. :-)

So I can either have my data or my metadata, but not both?

Grr.

Thanks for reporting on this -- it is new to me.

I can imagine that if the source was available, you could fix it -- but now you are s.o.l.

I never had similar problems with my Palm Pilot, a similar consumer oriented device with a lot of complexity, where you'd figure you might get a big fat failure like the one you experienced, and the consequences might be more catastrophic -- economically speaking.

Haha.. thats why real music affecinados use winamp.

itunes is teh suck

Well, two things:

- backup? have one somewhere? get your old library file and try having the upgrade process run again?

- blaming Steve Jobs? You can blame him for a lot of things concerning Apple, but I don't think flaws in the software or the hardware are one of them. You don't blame Bill Gates when Word eats one of your documents or your XBox catches fire, or you when Y! acts up...

Mike

Mike:

You must have missed the part about my pulling the archive from backup and trying this a few times already.

Also, when I'm really upset, I'm likely to blame the first person that comes to mind when I think of a company--the master salesman that makes you think the iPod is the greatest thing to ever happen to digital music. That's Steve.

You might take a look at JRiver Media Center. It isn't free, but organizing music is a lot more flexible than with iTunes. I'm *THINK* JRMC supports AAC in its DRM'd format and I know it supports copying MP3 files to an iPod. (I convert all of my iTunes purchases to MP3). Standard disclaimer - I have nothing to gain by promoting JRMC. I'm just a satisfied user.

Try www.oldversion.com for the older version of iTunes.

I did the same thing that you did, except I didn't realize the songs were missing and a month later I bought a new computer -- so 1000 songs disappeared into the ether.

I'm convinced that iTunes sucks ass with music by design so you buy the stupid songs again from itms.

I was wondering if you had tried the fix that Apple has posted on their site.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301895

When iTunes upgrades your Library (if ever), it should make a backup that you can restore from. I had no problems upgrading 4 of my systems (Mac and Windows) to iTunes 6. But the last system after the upgrade had none of my music at all. I tried this trick and it worked.

I had a similar thing happen to me back with 4.x, but I don't remember the exact details, which is too bad because that mean everything I say in the next few paragraphs may be crap. Sorry.

I "solved" the problem by putting the "whole library" view on screen, playing the first song, and then pressing the right arrow key to advance to the next song. I don't remember if I leaned on the key, or if I had to step one by one. I also don't remember how I got around the "would you like to locate it" crap. Maybe I didn't have iTunes set to play the songs?

Once I'd done that, iTunes had marked a bunch of files as missing. So I located and deleted the missing songs. Then I did an "Add to Library" and fed iTunes the whole library directory. It used to be smart enough to ignore any tunes it already had in the library, but I'm not sure about iTunes 6.

Bleah. Suckage. Good luck.

Ten:

Nope. Where'd you find that, anyway? I wonder why I wasn't able to track it down when I tried...

Could this possibly help?:

http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/blog/_archives/2005/10/18/1307475.html

For these types of problems, googling and yahooing only get you so far. The best place to look is Apple's discussion forums. Here's the one you want to look in:

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=150

Forgot to mention that the discussion forums are excluded from indexing, so that is why googling or yahooing do not work.

The page has "googleoff: index" before the body content. That's documented as causing the Google Search Appliance to stop indexing at that part of the text but might also affect the main Google search or other searches - I don't know.

Sorry to hear that this happened to you. It really is frustrating and does suck!

I had this happen to me before and this is what I did to "fix" things, which restored both my music and retained the metadata. Wanna point out ahead of time that I can not guarantee that a 4.x library will work properly with a 6.x library. :-)

1. Restore your working backup of iTunes 4.x and your music library.

2. Copy iTunes Library.itl, iTunes Music Library.xml and all your music in to a "backup" folder.

3. Open up iTunes 4.x and select all music from your library and delete it. Exit iTunes 4.x

4. Upgrade to iTunes 6.x.

5. Open iTunes 6.x just once and then exit it immediately.

6. Copy iTunes Library.itl, iTunes Music Library.xml and all your music back to their respective directories.

7. Open iTunes 6.x. Your library *should* be properly restored.

Again, no guarantee but it has worked for me on more than one occasion, on multiple computers. Good luck and hope that the frustration subsides! :-) If not, just eat some turkey; that makes all the worries in the world go away!

Jeremy you poor baby you only have 500 CD's. Well, try 1200 CD's plus 5000 old LP's that I converted to Digital via CD Spin Doctor including my Beetles collection and the Mama and Papa, not mention Bob Wills, I re-mastered to Stereo etc.

I had the same problem with the upgrade to 5.0, three upgrades back. (You missed part of the collection when it set up for 5.0 which you skipped. It also has happened before somewhere about 4.4. It is not big deal. Just follow these simple instructions and stop crying. These are are hard to find in HELP but they are there.

In the iTunes preferences on the Advance tab (it is now a button) Tell iTunes where the iTunes Folder and iTunes Music folders are stored by using the "Change" button (This tells the computer where the folder is and it is in or not in the User folder etc). In my case its a whole another hard drive (external 250 GB) call "Big Disc" (my name on the Mac desktop with two HD's). In fact, that folder is just above the "Kraft Holiday software for the iPod" folder. Today I am hearing about Turkey Leftovers and how to fix them.

On the View Menu of of that Hard Drive use the "list" setting. If you want the trick to open every folder inside all folders, you hold down the option key. This may take a couple of try's as "Static-X and Black Eye Peas" have five or six sub-folders and the Beetles have 14 sub-folders etc.

Now go to THAT (your) iTunes folder (iTunes and inside iTunes Music) and DRAG (I teach Excel) /highlight every item in it (in my case over 32,500 plus songs, then videos, books, etc). Click on the Top Item, hold down the mouse button and DRAG down to the last item.

Now that you everything is HIGHLIGHTED, do a double click on the last song in the list. This opens and indexes every DAMN thing in the iTunes folder and its a mess on the desktop (about 150,000 folders/songs/etc open. After 10 or so minutes it will completed the task.

Dig down to the iTunes program (or click on iTunes icon in the Dock) and it will work it way to the top when it have indexed everything.

From time to time, if you have over 400 or so CD/Albums plus purchased music in iTunes you will get "a help find dialog box". You can always tell which songs need help by an "x" in the number column of iTunes.

When you skipped iTunes 5, you missed the new inventory which was part of iTunes FIVE and necessary for keeping track of different types of files like videos etc and PDF files (Booklets of photos and liner notes and the Bands thank you liners etc.) I now have music videos from 47 countries. All "enhanced" CD's have videos you can import to iTunes. Make a new playlist called "new imports" and drag the file to "new imports playlist" and you now have a new song/podcast/video/etc in the Library.

I have just over 200 GB in the iTunes Library now and dropping hints for Christmas that I new a new Hard Drive. I dropped the hint to my roommate yesterday when he handed me his iPod (I gave him for his Birthday) and said add all the new stuff and make sure you get Don Johnson Big Band (Finland) and Nine Inch Nails videos on there. He just left for "the City" (San Francisco) via BART (of course watching videos) and was asking which stop to use for the "Apple Store and CompUSA?" I wonder what he in going to buy.

So now when I go to transfer all the old music to the new drive how will I tell it where to find it? The Steps listed above with one exception. When ITunes has all the music listed/indexed, I will do a force Quit of the Finder so I do not have to close 200,000 plus folders. After 20 years of using Macs (and 15 years teaching on PC's) I know all the tricks. While writing this I did a repair job on a Dell via telephone. Note: if you are using a PC you do not have a dock, so you just play hide and seek to find the iTunes program.

Yes, I use an old 100 disc (CD/DVD) spindle with my backups. A good trick is to use a "Smart Playlist" called "Protected" and set it up using "Kind" and type in i.e. "Protected ACC audio file" or what ever type music file you keep on your HD. You can burn several CDs or DVDs as backup when it asks for a blank disc on the one smart playlist thru iTunes.

OK Jeremy, now you can cry that it will not show that Hotel California by The Eagles has not be play 149 times, but all you music is there. So, play it 149 more times. If you need help in the future... and I am sure you will... next to the window menu is a item called the H-E-L-P menu and all these tricks are listed under HELP on both Mac and PC editions. There is also a section on what new like a new tab on "Get Info" called Lyrics, I have installed "Get Lyrical 0.7" that find and inserts the Lyrics for each of your 6,000 or so songs you cannot find. I love the folders and sort my playlist. Since you like the "F" word, I just made a smart playlist and found I have 130 song with that word in the Title. I made a Folder called "Four Letter Words" and I thought of various four letter word and the first to pop into mind was help. I hope this is some help. If you get duplicate songs go to Edit menu and choose "show Duplicate Songs. Note: check name of album and time and Title as some songs are on different albums or you may have an ET the same title done different ways i.e., same song but 3 minutes and 18 minutes arrangements including a 10 minute drum solo. Also you may find Bing Crosby on the album Best of Les Paul plus The Andrew Sisters and Dick Haynes appeared on that album. This kind of Albums/CDs are filed under "Compilations". I have many such CD/Albums like Red Blood Blues (an HBV benefit CD by the best blues artists) or Guitars that Rule (The best guitar players) and of course Woodstock (many greats showed concert with several albums). For you Info: I have 300 songs showing as duplicates but none are the same as they are from different artists, albums, and even years... i.e., a 1937, 1947, 1957, 1967, and a 1997 and done as Country, Jazz, and rock. Les Paul did as Jazz in 47, 57, and 97. Jimi H did it as rock in 67 and Leon McAuliffe wrote it in 1937 for the King of Honky Tonk as a country song and play the guitar on "Steel Guitar Rag. for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys" I have 49 Genres as listed by Grace Note CDDB.

Now should I write a Steve Jobs a nasty note that when I switch HD's is won't show that Hotel California has been played 149 times. The Help menu tell you how to re-set it to zero but it does not tell how to re-set Steel Guitar Rag to 29 plays for Leon's 1937 song that sold 1 millions copies at 25 cent per 78-RPM Record on the Okay Label (Cheep/low price) a subsidiary of Decca Records.

Jeremy,
You've complained so many times about ipod and itunes. Why are you still using it?

Why do you have two ipods???

1200 CDs * $15 = $18000. Wow. Waste of money IMO, but if you've got more money than you know what to do with...

If you're looking for older versions of iTunes you can find them here:

http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/apple/iTunes/

All versions that were ever released for both Mac OS (9 and X) and Windows. Not sure how useful it will be.

You lost hundreds of tunes from your library probably due to a bug in a software (a tautology if there was ever one http://davenet.scripting.com/1995/09/03/wemakeshittysoftware ) and I agree that Apple owes you an apology at the very least.

Yahoo lost me one year of email and not because of a software bug but because of yahoo's *incredibly* DUMB business processes where two different departments (billing and operations) apparently can not coordinate to match who is paying for an account to the account they're paying for.

And we're in 2005 and yahoo is supposed to be some kind of technology company.

What do you think yahoo owe me?

= tmk =

Jeremy,

I hope it's not truly evil for me to rub salt into a wound, but when I read this:

> You're lucky I can't use anyone else's software to put music on my iPod.

I just couldn't muster up too much sympathy. Why *DO* people continue to buy into and/or suck up to Apple's closed system? When you buy an iRiver or a Zen portable, for instance:
1) You can use them with at least a dozen music download sites... not just iTMS.
2) You can use a ZILLION pieces of software to manage your tunes (like an earlier poster, I'm a fan of J Rivers Media Center... very powerful!)
3) You aren't paying a premium for style and coolness.

Sure, Apple's got a neato click wheel. That's admittedly nice. But other than that, I really don't see the allure of the whole iPod brand other than as something that's "trendy." And, as we see here, rather buggy to boot.

Sorry this has happened to you, but a) as lots of folks have pointed out, there is a fix, b) you should've been backing up your laptop, anyways, so that you could've rolled back to a known good state, and c) that's what you get for using a big ball of yarn OS like Windows.

You really ought to be using something more modern, secure, and easily tweaked like OS/X. It just works better, it's easier to back up and restore (probably the reason you didn't have a current backup, it's just too much trouble to do so in Windows, isn't it?) from/to using Carbon Copy Cloner, as well.

Keep expecting this kind of nonsense as long as you continue to use Windows, irrespective who writes the applications you use. I guess I'm just shocked that somone of your technical reputation would even consider using such an insecure, unsecutable, and hideously convoluted OS as Windows XP.

Sorry, but in "accepted it's offer".....it's "its" not "it's"... you know, his, hers, its...none have apostrophes.

Sorry, it's grammar not grammer!

Aren't you the guy who was talking about how he was ditching his iPod because of Yahoo Music Engine? So you went and bought another one??

"You're lucky I can't use anyone else's software to put music on my iPod."

Well, depending on what you want to do, you can:

http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod/

I had the CDDB problem too until I realized my security software was silently blocking the look up

I have no truck with metadata as I have found it none too reliable for just such reasons as you note. However a simple fix for this without bringing along your metadat is to simply erase your itunes music library xm l file and database file. Then restart iTunes and add music from your hard drive root. All of your music will be available and properly available after this.

I would just like to refute a few things that Adam mpsted.

First of all, I consider the iRiver or Creative players to be just as proprietary as Apple's system. Look at these other players. Only works fully with Windows XP, only supports Microsoft DRM. The iPod is the only player that supports both Windows and Mac, so for that I consider the iPod to be a bit more "open" than competing players.

It doesn't matter that there are a dozen other services that you can use with the other players; they all offer the same music for pretty much the same price. Once again you're going to be using Microsoft's proprietary DRM; and this only works on Windows, hindering you from using any other platform to download your music.

You can also use products other than iTunes to manage your music. Winamp has a plugin avaliable and J River works with iPods as well, so this point is potentially unfounded.

I also have to argue that when the nano was released, it was one of the cheapest flash-based players for the capacity offered; the intro of the nano caused other MP3 player makers to drop their prices.

I own an iPod and I didn't own it because of its "trendiness". I bought it because in my opinion, it was the most elegant player on the market that offered seamless integration between my computer, my music, and my habits. People have much more agency than you give them credit for.

I also have to argue that there are a whole lot of people that are not having problems with their iPods or iTunes, me being one of them. I sympathize with your experience, Jeremy, and hope that Apple does do something regarding this.

Don't get me wrong. I love my iPod. I also like iRiver's players. But as soon as something better comes along that suits my needs better than iPod and is a joy to use, I'll buy that. Until then, I'm content with my iPod.

>> You're lucky I can't use anyone else's software to put music on my iPod

gnupod

i bet it even works on osx, its all perl code (so you can script it)

also gives you a separation between the code that lays tracks on to the ipod and the code that is your "jukebox"

p.s. jeremy this post is you at your best! screw the detractors. rant on, its refreshing to see someone take an opinion that puts them at risk, the rest of the blog sphere has become a realm of sycophants.

J.River's Media Center does in fact support the iPod (and has pretty much since the 3G units came out back in 2003). It'll handle non-protected AAC files just fine, assuming yo have Quicktime installed (apparently, adding native AAC support legally would add $10 to a $30 product). If you bought anything from the iTMS, you'll need to load one protected AAC file from iTunes to make things work.

It's not 100% support - they're in the process of making album art work, podcast support isn't quite as well-integrated as iTunes, and it'll do nothing with videos on the 5G iPod (in fact, it does minor database borkage so you have to flip back to iTunes for video after syncing audio in MC).

Plus, it does a better job of cataloging your music, so you can get more creative with smartlists - ie "Give me 100 tracks rated 4-5 stars, have not been played in the last 2 weeks, nothing by Al Green, no more than 2 songs per artist, no songs older than 1975".

Uh ... you could have just gone to the preferences and told iTunes to re-search your entire hard drive and add all the MP3s it found to its library.

Yet another clueless rant. Writing a perl script, indeed. I think you are overqualified to solve this problem.

DB.

>> You're lucky I can't use anyone else's software to put music on my iPod

I don't know you're existing library's format and your OS, but I really like the open-source ml_pod plugin for Winamp.

It is especially nice if your audio library is larger than your iPod, you can easily move files back and forth between the iPod and your PC. Rather than syncing the entire library, you just send what you want, and it takes care of detecting dups for you. Plus, if you need to relocate your music folders, it won't break.

IMHO the iPod is a great piece of hardware, but iTunes the store and iTunes the software suck. iTunes should be avoided like AOL.

Sorry to hear you are having trouble, just thought I'd share what works for me.

Wow. The comments in this thread are almost more interesting than the post.

Some people blamed him for not giving more technical details, or for using foul language. Duh. It's a *rant*. I didn't see him as asking for help, or making any pretense of being rational or logical. He was venting anger, pure and simple.

How many people have offered a solution that amounts to "nuke and re-import, losing metadata" when he specifically said he does not want to lose his ratings and playcounts?

How many people have said "you should have had backups" when he specifically mentioned that he did and tried the import process multiple times?

Some people have even taken it as an excuse to blame windows! How in god's green earth do you get to that conclusion? Because a particular application written by Apple does not upgrade very well that is somehow windows' fault? That is the most illogical thing I have read in a long time. You could *almost* make the case that because windows is *different* from OS X that Apple has a harder time making reliable software for it. But that is *Apple's* fault, it has nothing to do with the quality or lack of quality of Windows.

Blaming Steve Jobs? Sure. I don't think Jeremy is *actually* *literally* blaming Steve *personally*, but that is the function of a figure-head: to represent the company both for better or worse. And it seems appropriate to blame him in this case, given how many times he has sold the iPod and iTunes as reliable and easy to use. I think it's entirely appropriate.

Wow, a sane voice among the sea of comments!

Doh, I missed the part about backups - apologies.

Still, Windows is just a big ball of yarn. Neither Apple nor anyone else can write decent software for it - you'd be far better off with OS/X or FreeBSD or Linux, where it's easy to get under the hood and tinker with it in order to fix things.

Sure, iTunes for Windows sucks (thanks, Apple). So does everything else for Windows (thanks, Microsoft).

Hey, I expect problems like this are Apple's way of making windows users feel at home.

Not to be one of those dicks who chastise you for using the wrong hardware/software set up, but ... okay, I guess, to be one of those dicks ...

Instead of the closed loop of itunes/ipod -- which works well until it doesn't work, and then you're screwed -- I use an old iRiver. It just shows up on XP as an external drive. When I want new music on it, I drag it there with explorer. Simple. I use foobar2000 to play/rate/organize music -- it will do everything iTunes does, but better and more transparently.

I have nothing against iTunes, but I don't understand why tech-savvy people want to put their music entirely in the hands of a completely opaque piece of software.

Jeremy> same problem on my laptop. iTunes 6 lost all my MP3 (mainly podcasts) with the ratings, seen/not seen episodes, etc.

This *IS* definitively a bug. Couldn't find a menu option to repare, so I gave up. It is not my role as a consumer to google for fixes in technical forums... iTunes needs indeed to have a 'repair' this option somewhere.

Jeremy> update to my previous post.
indeed I followed the *unclear* instructions on http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301895.

"Drag the iTunes Library file from the above location to the Desktop."
=> I had 2 files called iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml. I just deleted both.

"Rename this file to iTunes Library."
actually the correct name is 'iTunes Library.itl"

and indeed it worked. How difficult for Apple would it be to automate this recovery process with a small script ?
I hope the problem for upgrading is solved now in 6.0.1.

Thanks for your ranting, it helped me solve my problem.

I've run into a problem where my iTunes library thought I had fewer songs than I had on the hard drive. Reimporting your library is a really easy, I've used it before without problem, and it might help.

1. Open iTunes, and select all your songs. I think this is ctrl-A in Windows.

2. Delete them, but DO NOT send them to the trash. This tell iTunes to delete the songs from its library, but it doesn't delete them from the hard drive. It leaves the artist, album and song directory structure alone while rewriting the Library index files.

3. Using itunes, import the top level of you Music folder, and iTunes will rebuild its library from scratch, rewriting the Library index files.

4. If this doesn't recover your missing songs, drill down in your Music directory and locate a song file that you know is missing from the Library, and try to import it manually.

When I did this myself iTunes complained about the format of the song file, that something was wrong and the song was unusable. In my case, it was the first sign that my Hard Drive was failing. About a week later, it failed completely and had to be replaced.

When I had to find only two missing files, it was impossible to do it manually, and I ended up writing a script to parse the iTunes xml file and compared it to what it found on the hard drive. It was truly a pain in the butt translating from songs with accented names and artists in the XML to how the songs files were named on the hard drive.

Sounds like most (if not all) you folks are Mac users, but lemmee tell ya, iTunes is just as crappy on the PC side. When I upgraded to v.5 a few months ago, it stopped recognizing my iPod completely. Nor could iPod Updater perceive that any 'pod was connected, by either USB or Firewire. But Windows _did_ see it and display it as a removeable drive.

Then I recalled that WinAmp had a free plugin for iPod management. It works flawlessly, and I've never gone back to iTunes.

Rant -- fairly advertised. Can't tell whether you seek solace or help, or both.
You use Windows, I use Mac -- your choice, my choice. In either case, shit happens. No software developer is perfect, neither are the users, including you or me. Some Mac users I believe attempted in good faith to offer positive suggestions of help -- hard for me to judge how useful these are to you. I'm dangerous on Window as you may (or may not) be on Mac, since the two OSs are different and therefore iTunes on each is different (and not equal). Even though it may be a little hard to find, Apple does prove significant support resources for iTunes for Windows (as others have hinted at). Rant if you must, but please give Apple (and Steve Job) a fair chance to serve you. Use the iPod + iTunes tab (at top of the www.apple.com home page) for general info about the products, but use the support tab for help. From the latter tab, you can refine your focus on iTunes and will be able to search entire technical information library and participate in their discussion groups. If you give this a fair shot and still come up SOL, then I will join you in a true bitch session. As much as I am pro Apple products, I also have my little irritations with some of their products and OS decisions (you don't want to know). Nevertheless, Apple could do a better job of explaining their software products and how to use them. Possibly this would avoid some problems like the one you experienced.

"Steve Jobs, you owe me an apology."

Bwahahahahahahahaha. Sorry about your tunes man...but that apology bit was the funniest thing I've read all day.

Glad you enjoyed that bit. :-)

To say that you'll never upgrade a piece of Apple software seems a bit on the drastic and melodramatic side. While you may have this problem, there are more people for whom the upgrade went smoothly, like me. We are a Mac shop, but we have a lone PC at the office, and besides using it for testing websites in Exploder, we also use it as our office stereo using iTunes. Every single upgrade has gone smoothly. Upgrading Microsoft software has screwed up our computer many more times, but despite that we will certainly continue to apply updates from Microsoft.

Your experience seems to be aligned with most experiences I've had dealing with Windows: it sucks in so many ways. Yes, it's surprising that Apple's software made such a drastic error, but I would imagine that programming for Windows is somewhat more challenging than programming for the Mac, and it's probably difficult to anticipate every little quirk in Windows that could perhaps have played a role in your iTunes library's demise.

I personally would use nothing other than iTunes because it ultimately is a really nice piece of software -- even on Windows. A friend of mine was using a whole bunch of different software packages to manage her music collection, burn CD's, etc. I once watched the process she had to take to burn a CD, and it was ridiculous. I installed iTunes for her, consolidated all of her music, and showed her how easy it was to create a playlist and burn it to CD. She was astounded at the new way of doing it, and seemed unconvinced that there weren't more steps.

If you're demanding an apology from Steve Jobs, I hope you also hold people like Bill Gates and Steve Balmer to similar requests. If I calculate the number of hours I've spent writing special stylesheets and code so that Internet Explorer displays things the same way as every other browser and then billed Microsoft for the time, they'd owe me a lot more than an apology. Hell, I could probably afford my own private jet!

Jason Kratz said:
Aren't you the guy who was talking about how he was ditching his iPod because of Yahoo Music Engine? So you went and bought another one??

Yes, he is. In his entry about YME, he admitted to selling his iPod.
My sympathy level has dropped, while the "humor" and "irony" level are skyrocketing.

The same happened to me not when I upgraded but rather when I changed the library form a place to another. The fix (if I remember correctly) was to drop the folder containing my music collection over iTunes window. After a while my library was working again.

P.S. I don't now if someone has already suggesteed this, I did not have time to read all the replies ;-)

#1 This is clearly an issue with itunes, not the ipod. So be angry with iTunes if you must but obviously your iPod had nothing to do with the issue of a few lost songs.

#2 iTunes is free software and you use it at your own risk (EULA) which is the case for all free software. I've had numerous problems with winamp back in the day. But it's free software and obviously it may have a few issues to it. Or the programmers could just totally suck ass. you really never know. I doubt mr jobs will be offering an apology anytime soon. But if you really want one, you should try emailing him directly and asking rather than posting that you want an apology on your blog which (no offence) i'm sure he doesn't read.

#3. JEREMY HAD A BACKUP PEOPLE! SO STOP POSTING AND SAYING HE SHOULD HAVE HAD A BACKUP. JEEZ, READ BEFORE YOU POST AND LOOK LIKE ASSES.

#4 And while a rant is a good way of blowing off steam, it isn't as productive as asking for a bit of help (and clearly had you asked you would have received).

#5 Issues with Apple products? Try using Apple's support pages rather than just googling or yahooing for answers. Or visit your local Genius Bar, or call AppleCare, both are good options.

i hope you get your issue sorted out.

Jeremy was ranting which he is free to do whenever and however on his blog. He wasn't asking for help. He wasn't asking for sympathy. He wasn't asking for anything, just letting off some steam. And the part about the apology from Jobs, I believe that's called hyperbole.

You have a potty mouth.

Why do people use portable music players, anyway? What's wrong with vinyl?

jeremy -

so you don't need to re-import; you can just "find" them again, as i am sure you have found out.... a pain, but better than re-ripping.

Here is a trick that may work (try it on a small set first). It has worked for me for a similar problem, but may not work on your problem:

Dump all the missing files into a folder and then add that folder to iTunes. You will end up with 2 records in the DB/itunes for every song you just added -- but the OLD records, the ones that still have your ratings and play counts, should be intact and now should pick up the new files. Just double click each one to "play" the track and re-introduce the location. you can just delete the "new records. but DON'T allow them to be moved to the recycle bin. You can quickly find these by sorting by "Date Added".

Sorry old boy.

I'm sending you a gift check for 100 free songs.

PS. The checks in the mail.

A few bits...

http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=138888

http://www.ipodsoft.com/

http://www.ephpod.com/

...excellent solutions as long as you aren't buying DRM'd files from the store.

Funny, I've always liked Windows because, whatever way you wanted it to work, it "just worked", and never liked the Mac, because it never "just worked" the way you expected it to. But I guess everyone has a different opinion as to what "just worked" means.

May be this can help solve your problem?

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301895

(via Daring Fireball)

Wow. John G. Melone, like to brag a lot. 200GB of stuff. 1200 CD's and 500 LP's - including the ever so rare "Beetles". Those must be hard LP's to find.

He also has 20 years teaching Mac and 15 on PC's. You HAVE to listen to him because he IS the EXPERT!

Also, for your information, did you know that John G. Melone has 300 songs showing as duplicates but none are the same as they are from different artists, albums, and even years?

He typed his entire post while making a Dell support call! This guy is a GOD. Can you please post his email address so I can email him? I want to be his friend. His best frind. Bestest friend ever. I may, at some point, want to have sex with him too but the only way I can get that is become his friend so I need his email address. Please......

Hey John G. Melone....get off your fucking high horse you fucking brag artist. You're the type of tool that thinks your shit doesn't stink when it's the worst of the bunch. Instead of going off on a diatribe why not just say what has worked for you in the past and explain why the upgrade to version 6 didn't work because there was no upgrade to version 5 first? Would that have killed you or did you need to add in every little non-important thing in your life into the post in a vauge attempt to be funny which only ended up being highly demeaning?

Thanks for some of the advice, blow the rest of it out your ass.

*snicker*

This is a fascinating post, socially speaking. I run into this problem ALL the time.

You posted a rant. You got people trying to solve your problem; trying to tell you they had it worse; criticizing you.

Tom Limoncelli, an amazing sysadmin (he co-wrote "The Practice of System and Network Administration" and wrote O'Reilly's new "Time Management for Sysadmins" book) and friend of mine, will specify when he's talking or blogging about something like this.

His standard disclaimer is "I want support, not solution."

*hugs* I'm sorry Steve Jobs ruined your Thanksgiving.

Quote:
"KP...."
What he said.
----------------------
Jeremy, guess some people can't differentiate a rant from a not-rant.
----------------------
As for those saying Mac is better, and XP sux. Jeez, get a life and leave me alone. Surprised the penguin crowd hasn't jumped in.

More serious than this iTunes issue is that the fact that I cannot make backups with rsync because it's constantly crashing with -E under Tiger

backup.sh: line 32: 5134 Bus error sudo /usr/bin/rsync -E -v --temp-dir=/tmp --archive --times --delete --delete-excluded --exclude-from="$HOME/backup_excludes.txt" / /Volumes/Backup/machine/ >$HOME/backup.log 2>&1

building file list ... done
rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 86 bytes: phase "unknown" [receiver]: Broken pipe (32)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-20/rsync/io.c(909)

sounds like user error.

Yeah, with the new itunes software i have been having CDDB failures too, WTF!! come on apple

Yeah, with the new itunes software i have been having CDDB failures too, WTF!! come on apple

We've also heard from users of iTunes who have had to pay twice for songs after downloads were interrupted.

We just bought an HP laptop at a Black Friday sale. It came with iTunes. We wiped it.

This same thing happened twice to a old teacher of mine.

He blames steve jobs too.

ps. The last "post a comment" field is hilarious.

I never ever trust these "would you like me to upgrade your music library" type actions. My latest move was moving my collection from an old PowerBook I sold to a new iMac I bought. Now I've found that the best way to do this is to NOT just drop your music from your 'old' ~/Music directory to your new ~/Music directory.

Instead, I just copied all my MP3's (the whole old ~/Music directory) onto my desktop, opened up a clean iTunes install (one that does not have any music in the library), and simple drag the entire Music folder from my desktop onto the "Library" item in iTunes (you know, the first item in the menu on the left within iTunes). It takes it's sweet time (for 2700 songs I think it took a couple hours?) but it didn't lose any of my music, and it also copied the mp3's into my new ~/Music folder in exactly the way that iTunes 6 wants them. After the import is done, I just blew away the music from the Desktop, and was good to go.

Someone might have already wrote all that down somewhere, but I couldn't be bothered to read every comment there.

-d

Among all of the workarounds, kluges, and alternatives, I didn't see an answer to the question that this rant brought up for me: is there any reason at all why you would *want* to "up"grade to iTunes 6 ?

Somethgin like this happened to me when I moved my library from one computer to the other.

You can fix it programatically but you will lose some meta data (playcount, and playlists can be messed up)

I suggest you back up before you do this just in case.

If you go File: Open Folder (or somethign like that) and point it at your music folder it will import all of the tracks that are not in your library, but the files are there in the folder. You will have duplicates though which your can find using the "show duplicates" feature.

To help get rid of them, I suggest you tag all the files that you just imported by sorting by added date and modifying somethign in the "get info" window (make the beats per minute 1337, or add somethign to the groupoing field or whatever you want to do).

Then View: show duplicates.

Then add all the duplicates to a new playlist. Hopefully you cna quickly go through the playlist and get rid of items that should not be there because itunes show duplicates does in fact suck.

THen make a new "smart playlist" based on your "duplicates" playlist and use the options to filter out all the tracks you just imported. The only thing left should be whatever duplicates snuck through your inital sweep in the "duplicates" playlist and the tracks that are not there anymore. Drag the contents of this playlist to another new playlist.

So select all, option+delete them BUT KEEP THE FILES. That will ghet rid of the database listings for the tracks that moved.

Then go "File: Open Folder" again and add back any tracks you accidentally deleted.

Your meta data will be screwed up a little, but your music should all be back in the library now.

I hope this helps.

Im sorry man for supplying you with FREE software that isn't idiot proof.
A few things you did wrong.
(1) Your on XP (XP is know for doing really weird stuff, especially with 3rd party software)
(2) Should have followed the upgrade path 4.9 to 5 to 6.
(3) Before trying to show your technical prowness and code a fix try something simple like
(a) check apple tech support website
(b) call apple tech support (it is a new nano and its related to getting your songs on your nano)
(c) ask online in some forums for help
(4) Before running off on a rant try steps 1 - 3 so you wont look as stupid when someone asks you, did you ask for help?
(5) Using the word FUCK to get attention is childish
(6) Delete this post because it doen't stroke your ego enough.
(7) Buy a mac

In iTunes click on Help in the menu bar > choose iTunes & Music Store Help > Solving Problems > I Lost the Songs on My Computer. Here is what it says (if that was to difficult for you). Major over reaction.

To make your songs appear in the library again:

Drag your iTunes Music folder (by default, located inside the iTunes folder in your Music folder) to the Library in the Source list. You will see the songs in your library again, but you won't see any of your original playlists.

If that doesn't work, your songs may be elsewhere on your hard disk. From the Finder, choose File > Find and search for a song by title or artist. Or search for "M4P" for files downloaded from the Music Store, or "MP3" for songs encoded in MP3 format. Drag folders containing songs to the Library in the iTunes Source list to add the songs to iTunes again.

Maybe this may be of some use to yourself or someone with similar problems. As with the others, not a perfect solution, but always worth a shot. Good luck!
http://blog.gadgetgurutech.com/2005/10/12/a-fix-for-ipods-0-song-problem/

I am really sorry to hear about your loss. Being someone that depends on my computer skills for work I must say it is very important to back up your work/files often. Just because things usually "just work" doesn't mean that they will "always work."

If I lost even a portion of my music because I didn't back it up I would say "F#ck myself!" not "f#ck Steve Jobs." Apple computer also kindly reminds every user that they should back up their library to a CD or DVD upon install.

I'm not trying to be a jerk. It just reminds me of being in school and having a teacher give another student an "f" for not having their work done when the student's excuse was, "my computer ate my homework."

I hope you can find a way to retrieve the lost files. They may still be on your hard drive, if they were not overwritten.

Best Wishes.

Jim, he did back of his files, that's not the problem. Also, the files are still on his drive just not being recognized by itunes. The problem is getting the files back into itunes while keeping metadata intact. Does anyone actually read the posts?

Yahoo Finance managed to lose all of my settings once. Jeremy owes me an apology!

This has happened to me before. If you're not too worried about playlists, then the simple solution is to rebuild your library from scratch.
Remove all of the songs in iTunes, but don't delete them from your drive. From there, it's just a simple matter of hitting Cmd-O and selecting the folder where you store all of your music. If the folder heirarchy is as it should be and you still have it set as the folder that iTunes saves all music to, then it should rebuild your music library with all of the ID3 tags intact without copying anything to anywhere it shouldn't be.
Hope nobody's suggested that so far (I didn't read all of the other comments) and I hope it helps.

Jeremy, do you need a 5.x version of iTunes? I have a copy on my hard drive if you haven't solved this problem yet...

Matt

Itunes is the devil, For any type of renaming, organiziation all that lovely bullshit I use
www.musicbrainz.org pretty awesome set up and many options to make sure 90% of your music is named and organized. I installed itunes once. Then i shot myself in the foot as a reminder to never use apple software again, the scar still hasn't healed.

In regards to this brillant post from Steve "Blow" Jobs - http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005732.html#comment-22782

This was a rant. In case your Apple excellancy has forgotten to read because your ego has gotten too large to remember basic learning skills I will quote the fourth sentence from the original post:

"Warning: If you'd rather not read a rant, please move on... Seriously."

Now. Let's break down the "intelligent" post from the King of Apple.

"Im sorry man for supplying you with FREE software that isn't idiot proof."

Hold on a second. Hasn't Apple always prided itself on being easier to use than Windows?!? If that's the case, shouldn't you be making the most idiot proof software on the face of the planet?

"A few things you did wrong."

Please define "wrong". "Wrong" according to who? You? Please...

"(1) Your on XP (XP is know for doing really weird stuff, especially with 3rd party software)"

Half the planet is on Windows. XP is a decent operating system. Personally, I'm running XP. I have iTunes. I have an iPod Mini. I've not had a single problem to date. Sometimes shit happens. As the almighty founder of Mac you should know this. Sometimes shit happens on a Mac. Case in point. A friend has a Mac, OS 10.2. He had iTunes 4.9. He has an iPod. He upgraded to version 6.0. He can no longer get the songs he purchased into his iPod. He comes to find out that version 6.0 is not compatible with his version of the OS. he needs to get the upgrade to 10.4 which costs $130. Nice job there Apple. Great job in making your loyal customers buy a $300 iPod then have to turn around and lay down another $130 to make sure the fucking thing works on your own computers. Last time I checked, I can load iTunes 6 on Windows XP and I don't have to buy another version of the OS to make it work. Sounds pretty idiot proof to me on the Windows side.

"(2) Should have followed the upgrade path 4.9 to 5 to 6."

Sound advice. But in the cases where someone didn't do the upgrade to 5, the idiot proof software should accomdate those people don't you think? Or would that fly in the face of Apple being just "better" than Windows?

"(3) Before trying to show your technical prowness and code a fix try something simple like
(a) check apple tech support website
(b) call apple tech support (it is a new nano and its related to getting your songs on your nano)
(c) ask online in some forums for help"

Ahhhh yes. The "I'm holier than thou" attitude. Keep that one up. It's the reason Apple has been a minor player in the computer industry for the past 20 years. Apple - the OS choice for elitist assholes.

"(4) Before running off on a rant try steps 1 - 3 so you wont look as stupid when someone asks you, did you ask for help?"

Please see comments for point #3.

"(5) Using the word FUCK to get attention is childish"

I'm sure you've never said that naughty word in your entire life have you? You're the cleanest boy on the block and your shit doesn't stink does it? Oh.....is "shit" like fuck? Childish? OK elitist snob.

"(6) Delete this post because it doen't stroke your ego enough."

His blog, he can pretty much do whatever the hell he pleases. You don't like it, start your own blog and join in on the power hungry masses that like to delete posts.

"(7) Buy a mac"

Cause that's the solution to all the worlds woes. How about developing a better piece of software?

Time to jump of the high horse there Mr. "Jobs". Please try to come up with solutions to the problem as opposed to being the problem. Might make the world a better place.

Um, why are we still posting about this? The fix has been mentioned several times--http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301895.

Now, it's just a matter of whether Jeremy chooses to fix it or not.

"(2) Should have followed the upgrade path 4.9 to 5 to 6."

And is it so hard to have the upgrade to 6.x check what version the user is currently running, and warn them if it's older than 5.x?

Apparently yes, it is. And the company that makes products like this is supposed to be the very definition of innovation and user-friendliness? Bullhonkey.

[sarcasm]
Oh, and posts à la that of "Steve Jobs" (whatever your real name might be) so make me want to switch to a Mac myself, so that I too might one day bask in the awesomeness that is Apple and show my overall superiority by flaming Windows users wherever I meet them.
[/sarcasm]

I mean, sweet Jebus, several of my good friends are Mac users, and I've never noticed this sort of behaviour with them. I can't help but wonder what sort of violent childhood trauma caused some people to become the embittered zealots that litter the Internet nowadays.

And before you try to be all funny and original and say "Windows", grow up.

Do yourself and favor and back up your music. You're a sad piece of work.

If you're looking for iTunes 5, try this link:

This is a download link, so don't click on it if you don't want the download. You can also go to & use Search to find it.

I feel your pain! Not only with your iTunes debauckel, but with all the "know-it-all" Mac users replying to your post!

Something similar happened to me. I was on iTunes 5.x and kept getting the nag to upgrade to 6.x....had ALL of my iTunes iPod settings the way I wanted them in 5.x (ie, the "NO AUTOMATIC SYNC" option in particular)...and once I upgraded to 6.x (all of which were on my secondary PC that had a minimal mp3 library)...ahem!...once I upgraded to 6.x and plugged in my iPod, ZAPPPP!!! There went all 10,000+ mp3's off my iPod, and on came the 50+ mp3's I had on my secondary PC.

So if there was only one thing I could say from all of this...it would be: "FUCK YOU STEVE JOBS!!!!"

Goto FILE -> Import folder and point to your library and it will rebuild everything automatically. Takes forever if you've got a lot of files but it's the easiest way to fix this problem.

Cheers

This is why California isn't actually in the United States. No where else could you curse at a competitor and THEN censor folks who try to correct you, and it's OK. "Rant" is not a universally approved code word for infantile language. And the 'momma' joke is hardly the high point of your Yahoo! history, too.

What really gets me? Whining about Itunes when you work at a COMPETITOR!!!! I think YOU owe ME an apology for the time I just wasted reading your blog.

"Do yourself and favor and back up your music. You're a sad piece of work."

Fred: which part of "entire collection from my pre-upgrade backups" didn't you understand?
Do yourself a favour and pay attention. Much to learn, you have, about the netiquette.

"
Oh my god, this is so heinously simple to fix, especially if you don't necessarily care about the meta-data, like playcounts and such.
"

What the fsck is with comments like this? Are these commenters simply retarded? The meta-data (especially the song rankings, but also getting the genres right, unlike idiotic CDDB, and sometimes setting start and end times to clip out random wanking that spoils the song) are what music lovers like myself, and I am guessing Jeremy, have spent YEARS building up.
Jeremy's anger on this subject is perfectly justified.
A user trusts an app like iTunes (and that other piece of junk in this respect, iPhoto) with a vast amount of their time, and these apps seem not to give a damn about treating that trust with the respect it deserves. It would be trivial for both these apps to come up with modifications that ensured that a users data simply never got lost --- and in five years or so they have not bothered to do so, though they seem to have plenty of time to constantly dick around with pointless crap like radii of the corners of the main iTunes window.

For what it's worth, this is not an isolated problem. My brother (PowerBook, not Windows) experienced the same problem a month or two ago.

I actually had a similar problem going from 4.7 to 4.9 - had to completely redo my libraries, and playlists, and iTunes managed to lose the bit rate/other data for 403 of my 40 GB Library after I reimported it, making the files play choppily (I finally got around that by burning the files to CD and reimporting them - a hassle, but it worked.)

My problem now is, I need to backup my iTunes Library, preferably to DVDs - but iTunes will not burn a DVD at any speed, which is crazy; it keeps telling me the burn speed is too high, even if set to 1x! And I've tried several types of media. This is infuriating, and I was hoping an upgrade would turn the trick, but if it makes you redo your library and screws it up again... well, I just don't know.

Okay iTunes officially sucks. But then everyone knows that. I had an issue with your statement that you are tied to iTunes because that's the only software that can update your iPod. False. Jeremy, I expected you to know better.

Try MediaMonkey (www.mediamonkey.com). Its free and the new version comes with the iPod plugin so you can begin syncing immediately. Some minor features missing (like ability to sync album art - but then I use iTunes on occassion to do just that and pictures). But overall a fantastic alternative to iTunes!

For those who want a way to fix it, I've posted small Ruby scripts on my blog (http://epirsch.blogspot.com/2005/12/fixing-itunes-6-library-with-ruby.html) that can be used to "fix" the library in the event that Apple's workaround is not working.

Its far from perfect, but it allowed me to fix my own library without wasting too much time.

Here is the proper link (without the closing parenthesis): http://epirsch.blogspot.com/2005/12/fixing-itunes-6-library-with-ruby.html

I just got distracted by this site while trying to solve some iTunes problems of my own.

There is a constant war of companies trying to make their shit the industry standard. Why doesn't iTunes use or export normal playlist formats? Because they want to BE the new standard. They want people to unwittingly end up so heavily invested in the Apple product, that the consumers have to make a huge "sacrifice" to change.

This isn't limited to iTune's. It's a corporate strategy gone awry.
1a. Apple comes out with IPOD (very nice player)
1b. IPOD requires Apple software iTunes (I know, there are alternatives now)
2a. Everybody likes music, but what percentage of those people are familiar with technology?
2b. Apple is known to be user friendly. Hmm.. the consumer doesn't have to know anything about technology.
3a. Consumers buy IPODS and have a pleasent initial experience with iTunes.
3b. Consumers continue ammassing, converting, and investing in their iTunes application.
4. Due to reason X, Y, or Z, something bad happens. There are lots of bad things mentioned in this blog.
5. The consumer is now in golden handcuffs. All the glitzy features that sold the software and hardware are tarnishing, but there is no easy retreat.

Apple never intended steps 4 and 5, but they happen. Part of Apple's user friendly reputation comes from the fact that they really do LIMIT the consumer's options. Anyone who's written any kind of code can tell you that every feature and every door leaves room for someone or something to use it differently than expected. Take the latest Apple OS. They started by narrowing the hardware field that they support. Then they then took a robust core (Linux) and basically built a gui around it that locked the user out of the guts. The end product is a lot more robust because they effectively sold you a car (pick a brand that you think is reliable.) If you open the hood and touch anything, you're going to void the warranty. Don't even bother asking for help... their trouble trees say something like "reinstall everything. This is important because Apple software written for Windows CAN'T take the same things for granted that it could in the MAC world. Now they are defying the logic that made their shit appear robust by trying to support things that they can't know everything about. Windows SW written by Apple will always be worse than Apple SW written by Apple.

Full circle... I' annoyed with iTunes because my girlfriend wants to use it for her IPOD, but she has music both on my computer and on her new laptop. It's no longer a matter of getting some backup software that synchs the mp3 directories periodically. Apple has started down this tunnel where they have everything integrated. Now they have to integrate some sort of synch software? I don't want to stumble through the experience of Apple learning how to do all of this with me as the test mule. I also don't want to wait for them to do it. I'm in the process of converting my Apple music to mp4, then maybe I can find a solution to keeping everything synched while still letting my girlfriend use iTunes.

This is the funniest thing I've read in a long time:

***QUOTE***
Button Pusher said:
Hey, I expect problems like this are Apple's way of making windows users feel at home.

on November 26, 2005 01:06 AM
*** END QUOTE***

Hi Jeremy, The exact same thing happened to me a few minutes ago. BTW, Apple's "fix" didn't work (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301895) and I still don't have my music. My husband's a lawyer and I plan on suing Apple. What a waste time my ipod has turned out to be.

itunes ruined my families winter break. The grandparents gave each of my kids ipod nanos, i installed itunes and have had nothing but trouble with it. At one point i was able to manually create a playlist and install music on my son's ipod. But when i tried to get our whole music library into the itunes folder, it has been insane.I can not believe how horrible the itunes software is. I want to return the ipods and get irivers or something that will work with XP pro, I must have spent over 30 hours trying to get this to work, what else can I say. Is there any intermediate software that would make this work? Maybe i will just throw out the ipods and tell the kids they got lost. It's not worth it, anyway they lost interest 15 hours ago......

I've had this problem a few times just because XP has nuked the files. In the end I created a little batch script to backup the xml files etc. Take a look at my blog entry to download the batch files. Of course if you are currently having problems then this won't help now. But it will save you some other time.

As for people complaining about iTunes, well i've had one other problem (import from directory doesn't seem to handle directories with a large amount of files properly), but other than that I find it very straight forward. But im not a beginner at these new fangled computing machines :)

I guess one other problem is having two ipods. I believe that the only real way to do this on one computer (unless you want the same music on both) is to use different login's. Seems like a big feature hole in iTunes. Unless i've missed a new feature in the many upgrades that have happened over the years (or the feature is only available when you have 2 ipods - i don't)

Mike Widrick, what a fucking cock-sucker you are. Learn to read English, fucking retard.

Ok, so everyone says to just blow away your library, and start again.

Bzzzzzt. No fucking good. Here's why:

1) I depend on the ratings. The only reason I keep with iPod
2) iTunes magically re-organized my files, and then lost them.

More on (2) - I know have a folder "unkown artist/unkown album" with hundreds of files in there, with ID3 tags in them, and therefore, no idea where they belong. iTunes, however, apparently does because the .xlm file still has all the ID3 information in it. Seems that it moved the files around before updating the ID3 tags.

That, my friends, is fucking insane.

iTunes has ruined my music collection. Thanks for nothing. And people wonder why I am still on the fence about Apple.

Jeremy,

Same FFFFFFFFFFFing thing happened to me when I finally caved in an upgraded. 8 FFFFFFFFFing gigs of music and no meta tags to my music library, all painstakingly burned with itunes version 4.9.

I am so FFFFing pissed.

Has anyone got a work around? I can't uninstall!!

Oh and apple, how about giving me the courtesy of a reach around the next time you FFFFFF me.

"And I'm going to think twice, maybe three or four time before I ever upgrade a single piece of Apple software again."

how about thinking about not using windows?

hahaha

BTW, same crap happened to me too, when I upgraded.

Now I was Googling for a way to force iTunes to write some files to my iPod. It seems that if your music library contains more data that can fit on the device, it randomly selects what to copy and I can't find no fucking way to force it include some files... x-( that's probably what they call 'smart' software.

I'm gonna get rid of iTunes and use GtkPod--much cleaner and unobtrusive...

It does begger belief that such a straight forward aspect to this product is missing.

I have just started using iTunes and after some PC 'house moving', lo and behold repeated items in the library. So lets see, wheres the re-scan library function... you're kidding.. what the..

I sympathise with your plight and anger. Doesn't it always seem to be the case that large business does somehow quash quality. One would have thought it would be the other way round, if anyone at apple was actually caring.

It also doesn't help when you get suggestions about one operating system vs another when the app itself seems to be squarely to blame. Do you know if anyone at Apple actually knows about this issue?

1 billion downloads and basic stuff is missing? Come on.. make an effort Apple.

hello... i am experiencing a similar frustration... on windows i upgraded to 6.04 (from 6 i think). i did all as normal i think - shut down the open itunes before downloading, etc. there was some window option toward the end asking about a debug, which i clicked the non- highlighted option. sorry i don't remember any more details - bit of an amateur...!
anyhow, when i opened the new itunes, not a single song out of 25 gig was there.
can anyone help me find them?
Will.

I am so sorry for your loss and a loss is all it is! This same thing happened to me and I was lost for the last month since it did! See my CD collection was stollen out of my house about 9 months ago during a BIG party I had and all I had left was my Library. All my CD's are also stored on my library at work but I can not take my work computer home and I have NO way of getting my music off my work computer and putting back on my personal home computer! Have any suggestions for me now?

To Amanda:
y dont u just get a usb drive or an external dvd writer n burn the songs on a dvd or with the usb drive u shud keep transferring songs itll take time but its worth it

if u need more help then u can email me at:-
parthshah89@gmail.com

Hi,

I read your rant. I just got an I pod and can't use it, because I can't use my mac. I am really sick and ended up paying 16,000.00 for a 6500 that has never worked right, due to baaaad advice from Apple. Still, I am too sick to try and go to Windows. I need a new lap top and clearly can't afford it. I have a real beaf with Apple and have for years. I am not going to go into the story, but I am glad to see someone with a straighforward Apple *RANT*

The only thing I don't see on this page is a way to contact Steve Jobs. I read his Stanford address and my problem with Apple, my computer, my current needs, and my serious illness is directly related. Since ALL the people myself and an attorney tried to talk and write to over at Apple could not get any where, except you can pay for more support, which if you knew the true story you would not believe how stupid that is and was, you would probably just through your hands up!

So, I have been trying my best to figure out how to write my story to Steve Jobs and hear what he has to say about out, given his outlook on life and the hell I have been through with the Apple company. I really do love the computers, and like I said, am way to sick to try and learn something new, and no way have the money I need to get a wireless laptop so I can do things like buy groceries, get prescriptions, talk to dr.'s, do my banking, and everything else in the whole world that now requires you MUST use a computer. Since I have been paying so much money for a computer that never worked right in the first place. Even now with cable it takes 5 min. a page.

Anyway, like I said, I am not really going into the real details so it is impossible to explain what really happened, but I want to know how to send a letter to Steve Jobs and I want to know what his response is. I want to know if he is true to the words he speaks. Because, I am going to have to get a lap top soon and I have a church willing to pitch in a couple hundred, but they are so expensive, that won't go far. It is a big deal and a big investment. I have had to use this old thing for so long, I am not even up to what is best to get and what the newer stuff means. How do I get help with that, which I can only lay down and will be down and barely able to brush my own teeth for 6 mo. to a year? Apple is suppose to be easy and I have not had one day of easy with this computer. I don't have much support, so this is my way to try and stay independent. I am only 40 and was misdiagnoised with my illness for a long time and now paying a huge price with my health as well as with my computer.

I would like nothing more than to be positive and hopeful and spend some time trying to get online support and look for something that "I Love" to do with my life and a point when I am well enough to move forward. That attitude in itself could probably help prolong and change my life. To bad I don't have a computer I can use to try out those new things. And, my young son (I am his only support) saved his money to by me an I Pod for Mother's day, so I could listen to good music during surgery, etc., too bad my apple won't let me put any music on it. So, there it sits in the box. Now, my son feels bad.

Again, I would really love to know what Mr. Jobs would have to say about this and the BS that Apple has put me through with the "pat" answers to everything. The so-called good loans that are not correctly described, even after you ask for someone to help with a person who has brain issues and really needs things spelled out. I ended up with a computer that was show room floor Power Mac 6500 for the same price and the new G3's came out, but what did I know. I believed them and back then, they wanted me to pay for every phone call after 30 days. Please don't go off on me. I am doing a bad job telling this story. And, yes, I am on the computer now, but only because I have to try and get email from my doctors and am only able to check about once a month, rather than several times a day. Opps, those last tests came out pretty bad, and I missed getting my new prescriptions by a month. I had to move to one of the best research centers in the country and it's all about email period. So, they do call when they don't hear from me right away, but still, sometimes I get lost and they forget, because it is 100% impossible to explain to anyone these days that I don't have email that works most of the time, what I have to go throught to get it to work takes hours, and I can only lay down anyway. So, off I go to take a whole bunch of pills to help deal with what the stress does to my brain and I won't end up in the ER because I checked email and HAVE to try and find a way to get a laptop and took the hours and hours it has been to go through a few pages and stumbled across this page.

Again, for all the complaints about wanting a way to get a letter to Steve Jobs, not once answer on that. I would like one, if any has an answer to that question.

All the best,
T Rene

"Oh my god, this is so heinously simple to fix, especially if you don't necessarily care about the meta-data, like playcounts and such.

1.) Move all the MP3s into one location outside the iTunes folder
2.) Delete all the MP3s from within iTunes (it'll delete all the meta-data without deleting the files themselves because they're no longer where they're expected to be).
3.) Make sure the "keep my tunes organized" option is checked
4.) Drag the folder you put the MP3s into in step 1 onto iTunes, it will happily churn across every MP3 in there and re-add it into your library

Finis. :-)"

That is simply unacceptable when you have 58000 songs and it took 2.5 days just to build the library the first time. I would just like to be able to sort by broken links (exclamation points) and maybe intelligently delete duplicates (there's about 1000 that I have no motivation to sit and sift through)

Hi Jeremy

I do understand your frustration, It happened to me with my iPod 5G 80Gb few months ago just after update the iTunes, I'm a musician and DJ, all my traks from work were GONE!, I was swearing so much at everyone.

I can't believe how apple has become such a money driven brand and forget about the loyal fans that support the bitten logo. Every time a new product developed in the "i" line there is an immediate update for iTunes to make it compatible with the new hardware.

But what happen whit all these "LOGICAL" missing features of iTunes? Like:

- Erase Duplicates
- Move external files to current iTune Library folder
- Locate missing files
- An option to enable "ask before sync"
- Save, import, export etc Play List (useful if you have an external hard drive and two PC's), or simply move your iTunes play lists to other PC because you are about to sell the old one.
- Create and RENAME a play list directly in the iPod (The hardware is there) so no excuses.

All this is common sense!

I haven't seen a REAL improvement of the iTunes software, all the have add the cover flow and few bits.

I don't know if you know about Microsoft Zune, I personally like the iPod, I had before other 3 devices but the iPod beats them, simplicity is the best.

The thing about MS Zune is that the first generation 30Gb can be updated with all the features that the newest one has for free. That's a gesture that makes me think a little bit different about MS, is the same with the release of SP3 for free.

While Mac is making you pay for any upgrade to the OSX, Microsoft doesn't, even after the release of Vista (wich is a new architecture and can't be consider an upgrade from XP) Microsoft releases a new upgrade for XP.

iPod 5G and iPod Classic are Firmware compatible and I could understand a bit, just a little bit if Apple don't want to release the exact new features to the old one, but it would make us feel a little bit better if he would release some new cool features to our old Video Ipods.

Here is a guy that explains the iPod-Zune thing much better with images. Is worth to see it.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/zune/firstgen-zune-getting-all-the-new-features-this-is-how-you-treat-your-customers-306422.php

Without any doubts Apple got the best hardware in many ways, design and functionality, iPod, iPhone, Mac's, of course all except the bloody mouses are very good.

Softwares are clever in many ways, but I think that Steve Jobs is so "scared" to release the good things to everyone at once and loose the market that he is forgetting about us, the customers that bought his product years ago. I didn't bout only one, also 3 nanos, for my girlfriend, brother and dad.

I was waiting for so long to have an iPhone and now in UK you need to pay £264 (the same as new) and pay £35 for 18 month to have access to some services, whats the point? why to rip people like that? If Apple main brains would be more intelligent they would have release the iPhone to all networks available in the UK and take Nokia, Sony, Samsung out of the game if is money what they wanted.

Technology still there, the iPhone can have more new features like 5Mp Camera with Xenon Flash, Safary with Flash enabled, Real GPS (no the fake N95 crap), more capacity and even more software and why not open source friendly?

So why not incorporate all the software features that iPhone and iPod Touch can handle?

I honestly would prefer to install a nice software from Apple that 3rd parties, but even there Apple is a step behind.

Do you know what is one of the main reason the hackers target Microsoft? well there was a movie about that, but I believe that with Apple approach they are loking for troubles too.

They are forgetting the people, us, and limiting us so much that we get frustrated.

Dear Steve Jobs, nothing is forever, we don get loyalty rewards from you, and if one day there is a new kit in the market and do what yours does in the way it does people will not think twice in change brand.

Think again.

Bruno.

PD: I'm Audio Engineer and there is another thing I would like to talk about iTunes Music Store, but that would be in another post.

Thanks.

i have an ipod touch, and i have itunes 6.0 and i notice a good number of my songs went missing!!!i tried redownloading them but some other songs went missing too!!!so i went experimenting and i tried (i found where the songs were stored) putting the songs that went missing into a different playlist and clicked sync and it worked, i have my songs back!!!

For the same reasons, I refuse to install itunes on my computer no matter how glossy or whatever features it says it has!