iTunes Rant II
Wednesday 29 July 2009 at 08:57 am For some reason there is never a lack or reason to rant about iTunes. Since I am now using my wonderful new iPod touch (and here and only here I am not being sarcastic), I thought I'd stick with the company to purchase a song I wanted. $0.99 is not too bad for song, especially considering that singles cost about 10DM back in the days when I was buying them regularly. Anyways, so I start up iTunes, the software once again (as so happens every other week or so), decides it needs a 100MB update (including all the other stuff like quicktime, safari, and the ipod software). Due to the size of the update I say yes to downloading it and continue on with my purchase. I enter all my information in the itunes store (btw, a horrible interface for finding an artist+song name combination), send my song to my cart, click buy, click buy once again ... iTunes notices my credit card info is missing, back to entering the card info, pressing done... now did that purchase the song or not? Well, I *think* not since the song is still in my cart ... so once again press buy, and confirm the buy - the song starts downloading -> wonderful - where it's downloading to - no idea...but I have high hopes that it's my iTunes music folder location and high expectations that it's my user/Petra/iTunes/music folder (which are not the same things).Somewhere during the download of my song, the download of the iTunes updates is done and it simply starts itself - that's not what I wanted when I said yes to the download. Fortunately, iTunes realizes and asks: "Do you really want to update? You are downloading a song and this may interrupt the download" - I say "no, please, don't update, wait for the download to finish". Ok, the download I think finished, iTunes closes itself, disappears, reinstalles, requires a restart of the computer (which given that I use Vista takes about 10-15 minutes or so), comes back up - and no trace of the song I just purchases or downloaded.
No trace? No! A small entry in the "Purchase History" menu reminds me of this recent purchase. However, no song is to be found in the "purchased" playlist, in my iTunes music folder, in the users/petra/iTunes/music folder or anywhere else on my PC for that matter. What the... Ok, next steps are googeling the problem. First, it turns out there is a menu entry to check for pending downloads. I click that .. no response since the file already downloaded before the update. Ok, so off to the iTunes Store support. Here I need to enter my purchase info and number. Of course, copy and paste from the Purchase History in iTunes is not possible so I have to copy everything over manually.
Anyways, a loss of $1 isn't horrible but this whole event took about 30mins of my time. Makes you wonder if it's even worth complaining. However, out of principle I want my song especially since this was my first iTunes purchase - and will certainly be my last.
UPDATE
To Apple's credit, their customer support seems to work. Erika from Apple contacted me tdoay and I got my song back - AND it did download to my regular music folder. Credit to the programmers for getting this right :D.
