I recently upgraded the home PC from an AMD Athlon 1.8GHz box with 512MB of RAM, to an Intel Dual Core E6300 with 2 CPU cores running at 2.8GHz, with 4GB of RAM. I had 64-bit Ubuntu Linux on it in 20 minutes......after upgrading Windows XP to 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium took 3 days of disaster and upset...but it was finally done. Licensing was the core of the problem...and XP having trouble seeing the new 500GB drive and insisting on destroying it on sight....repeatedly.The main reason for a "linuxluver" like me even having Windows at all is Apple's iTunes....so we can use our various iPods, which we mostly like very much. I have an iPod Touch and I have dearly loved my wee laptop-in-a-pocket from the day I got it....except for iTunes. It's far too restrictive. It's clearly all about what the vendors want....not what the customers want. Anything going on it that you can access from the iPod has to go in via iTunes. You can't just copy a file onto the iPod and use it....or copy it back off again.
iTunes and the business approach behind it (closed, proprietary, deaf.....) is THE reason why I bought an Android-based phone instead of "upgrading" to an iPhone from my iPod Touch.
Anyway, with the new PC, I upgraded to iTunes 9. I had copied the iTunes libraries for each of us from the old system to the new. In terms of responsiveness, iTunes 9 seems better than the previous versions, though they may be because this system is so much faster than the old one was. iTunes 8.2 on the old PC would ignore me for minutes on end while it downloaded a couple of podcasts....or whatever.
On the new iTunes, we were all syncing just fine.....until today.
Today, my daughter had her iPod plugged in. I swapped to my Windows user and I plugged in mine to charge up the battery. I tried to start iTunes, but it refused to go, saying it was being used by another user and I would have to stop it.
Ok, so I got my daughter to come over and switch to her Windows session, stop iTunes and logout of Windows. I then switched back to my session and started iTunes. iTunes behaved as though it had never seen my iPod Touch ever before. When i tried to sync, iTunes warned me it would wipe all the music off my iPod and replace it with music from my library.
I was mainly concerned about the $100+ worth of purchased music, but the songs I had purchased were clearly listed in the iTunes library AND on my iPod list of songs....so I thought, even if it wiped them off my iPod, they would still be in the library and be synced back onto the iPod from the library.
Wrong. iTunes wiped out my purchased songs EVERYWHERE....including in my library. It has to be a bug, but that makes no difference to me.....the result is the same.
OK...so I logged in to the iTunes store and checked my purchase history. The songs are all there with dates and prices of purchase. The store had previously let me re-download my apps when I first began syncing with the new system and it had wiped them all out. So I tried to download the songs again as I had done with the apps.
When I tried to download "One day" by Op Shop, iTunes told me I have already bought it.....do I want to buy it again? Or cancel. Fingers crossed.....I just want to download it again.....they wiped it out and I've already paid for it. But when I downloaded it again, I found they had charged me the $1.79 for the song I had already bought.
This highlights VERY clearly why paying to download music just isn't safe to do. I've lost over $100.....and no way to get it back. Have a look at Apple's "support" page sometime.....No joy there, I can tell you. Lots of FAQs that stay well away from what to do about lost purchases.
Lesson learned. I won't be buying any more music from the iTunes store. I'll be adding mp3 files to my Itunes library from external sources. If they mess it up again, I can just add it again and it won't cost me anything but time.
By comparison, "iMusic" on Android is a joy to use. I'm getting my music there....including the $100 worth of music bought over the last few months that Apple iTunes just destroyed.
On my Android phone I can just copy anything I want to or from whenever and wherever. I even have an FTP server and client on there. Maybe I'll let you download a song from my Android phone over the Internet. Because I can.
iTunes sucks. Death to iTunes and the closed, proprietary mindset that requires us to use this 'defectivebydesign' software.
Go to one of your iTunes receipts and click 'report a problem' next to one of the items, then explain the situation. I'm pretty sure they'll let you download it all again.
ReplyDeleteChris: Thanks. I did click on this "Report a problem" thing....but I didn't see any opportunity to explain anything. I was using iTunes 9. I'll have another look.
ReplyDeleteiTunes already saved the music industry by doing the opposite of what others where into, subscriptions. Why do people still want to shove those subscriptions down our throat. We didn't want them when iTunes was not around and we don't want it now.
ReplyDeleteTruthseeker, I sympathise. My wife bought an iPod a few weeks ago and I still can't make it work on my IBM Thinkpad.
ReplyDeleteThe laptop can see the USB and even knows it's an iPod, but after downloading iTunes (the long story about trying to make the iPod work with MediaPlayer is boring, but why doesn't the effin'iPod instruction sheet tell me that I need iTunes?) the programme doesn't recognise I have an effin'iPod attached.
Still have not been able to make it work.
Though I have tested the iPod on both a Mac and another PC and it's working fine there via iTunes.
I know you're not a technician, but if you have any suggestions you know how to get in touch.
Cheers
EM
I hate iTunes! to share my library in my home I have to log into my itunes account on each computer. Thanks Apple I really don't need to run up and down the stairs to listen to my music.
ReplyDeleteTried to buy a $5.00 gift card online. I could buy them at the grocery store - but not online or at the local Apple store.
Love owning Apple stock - hate iTunes
if you have the tunes on your iPod you have them. the iPod is a hard drive. use a program like Senuti or Ollies's iPod extractor and ALL your tunes and stuff will be installed to your computer from the iPod, that was my experience when my unit's hard drive died.
ReplyDeleteItunes is one of the worst pieces of software i ever encountered in my 36 years. It must be written by complete idits sorry. What is the most important thing you would think it should to RIGHT? Yes backup, restore and sync. Neither of these works seemingless. I got the genious advice by a apple express line that the reason why my music just was completely wiped off my iphone 4 was a inconsistency of the itunes with the iphone 4.1. So she wanted to tell me that the latest itunes is not working correctly with iphone 4.1 but only 4.3. Of course I didnt buy this but in the end thought that this might trigger something that then resolves the cause.
ReplyDeleteWell wrong thinking. It completely wrecked my phone and I had to spend hours syncing restoring going to the genius bar - which naming is quite daring from the level of knowledge they have. With the end result: All my settings lost pictures lost and funnily the phone also got quite a bit slower with the new firmware.
Some funny anectodes regarding the competent "Genius": Upon the sync failure she suggested with all earnestness that I must contact my laptop manufaturer lenovo to report the itunes-iphone sync problem.
And itunes is a different company apple can unfortunately not help. Are you serious????
Ok THANKS APPLE. i will never buy anything from you again.