iTunes Sucks

Welcome back! Yeah, it's been a long time since I've posted and people have been nagging for me to post something people can relate to. Apparently "fail2ban, dovecot and brute force attacks" just wasn't something that most of my readers could relate to. Rant mode on!

I must be an idiot, but for something that is supposed to be easy to use, iTunes just sucks. The iPod itself is OK, but that damn twirly thing either doesn't spin at all for me, or spins around the world, so yeah, that's annoying, too.

Wen calls me up today and says: I bought some songs on iTunes and they're not showing up! They ripped me off! So I'm thinking well, OK, billions of people use iTunes every day and I've never heard anyone complain about their iPod, so it must be a simple problem of not clicking in the right spot.

So I get on the PC and start clicking. Yep, iTunes Purchase History says that 5 songs have been purchased, but no songs are showing up in the Purchased area or the Music Library. A quick Google search reveals horror stories of people losing their Music libraries when upgrading to iTunes 7, but nothing that seems quite relevant to this situation.

A quick peek in the "My Music" folder and I find some suspicious .tmp directories named after the songs that were purchased, and inside 2 files, download.m4p and Info.plist.

I can play those download.m4p files with iTunes and they appear to contain the entire song, but now I don't have any of the song info. Aaargh! I want my freakin' music that I paid for and I just want it to work, damn it!

From what I can tell, iTunes downloads everything OK, but then when it comes time to move the download from the temporary directory to wherever it's supposed to move and do whatever with it, it gets stuck. Yuck!

Not to mention that browsing the iTunes store is an exercise in futility! The servers appear to be slower than a dead cat and rarely respond if at all, and never respond in a timely manner. Ugh!

Finally, I gave up on getting iTunes to recognize those downloaded m4p files and renamed them manually and assigned them the proper attributes. It only took me 3 hours!

Rant mode off.

Thanks, I feel a bit better now.