New Wye Oak album today! I pre-ordered it weeks ago, and when I turned on my PC this AM, there was a message from iTunes saying it was available for download! Yay!
So... I started iTunes, told it to start downloading, and went to play some Facebook Scrabble™. Boom! Error #50! Download failed about 1/3 of the way through for each of the first three songs! Grrr... OK, iTunes, restart the download on those three songs. It restarts, then finishes them and all the rest without further problems. Yay!
I decide to burn the album to a CD so I can listen on my way to work. iTunes says "No, these songs are not authorized!" "The fuck?" I ask. I play the first few seconds of each song, to see if it will prompt me to login and authorize any of them. Nope. No issues. Try to burn again. Same fail. Restart iTunes, retry the burn. Same failure. Restart the PC. Same failure.
Poke around the internet to see if anyone else has had this issue. Yep. Plenty. No resolution.
Then I see a comment on a message board where somebody says you can use Windows Media Player to burn iTunes songs. "The fuck?" I ask. So I try it. And, yes indeed, WMP can read and burn iTunes song files (.m4a files) to CD. Wow! I am the master of my digital media! Epic win!
Get in my car, put the CD in, it starts to play... about 1:00 into the first song, there's a 5 second silent spot. Odd. About 1:00 into the second song, there's a 5 second silent spot. "The fuck?" I ask. About 1:00 into the third song, there's a 5 second silent spot. The rest of the songs are OK.
So apparently instead of restarting the failed downloads, iTunes simply resumed them from the places where the download failures happened; and it didn't care that the last data it received was garbage, thus resulting in five seconds of silence in each of the files. Then it screwed up the authorizations for them.
That's it. No more buying songs from iTunes for me. Fucking idiots.
That sucks.
I use Amazon MP3 pretty much exclusively now and they have a neat Android app so I can download tracks straight to my phone (my primary listening source). Just bought the new Elbow album and the experience was painless. No ideas what would happen if a download failed though. Amazon also have a desktop download app that can sync with iTunes so your tracks end up in your iLibrary.
I’ve been lucky with iTunes I guess. My only real complaint is that the software is bloated and runs like treacle on our 2 year old laptop. What pisses me off the most are Apple’s nefarious business practices and I want to give someone else my money when possible. We buy the odd kids TV show on iTunes because it’s got the best content for that genre but it’s Amazon for music and Kindle books now.
7Digital are also good but they might be UK only. You can download purchased tracks as many times as you like and albums are often only a fiver.
i like Amazon’s service, and have never had any problems with it. but the iTunes store is just so (potentially) convenient! i keep getting sucked back in. and then it fucks up.
i’d cancel my iTunes account, but i have no idea what that would do to all the songs i’ve already downloaded from them … probably turn them into iStuxnet worms that would find their way out through my cable modem and then set fire to all the PCs in my neighborhood.
iStuxnet. That made me laugh out loud.
I enjoy watching how the original Goat Shit post continues to bring in visitors and comments.
Oh man, the new Elbow album is out??
Yup. And a new Strokes album is due in a week or so.
elbow? Amazon US says that’s not available until April 12.
new REM record, too. not that i care. they’re dead to me.
Strange there is a month between the Elbow UK and US releases.