Apple Music for macOS Still Sucks and it’s getting worse

It has been a little over two years since my last major rant about Apple Music. I occasionally whinge on Twitter or FaceBook, but no one really pays any attention — mainly because they are currently busily techsplaining why the latest Apple Hardware sucks. I currently have three issues, and they are all show-stoppers!

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

1. I usually can’t quit Apple Music without having to resort to a piece of third-party software
2. Search regularly crashes the Music app
3. I sometimes can’t add any more music to my library (sometimes I can!)
4. Downloaded albums and playlists randomly get stuck during playback at the end of a song

Apple Music ignores the request to Quit

When I have to use a third-party piece of software to close the Apple Music application, I’m pretty sure that the end is nigh. 99 times out of 100, Apple Music won’t Quit, won’t Force Quit, won’t quit via Activity Monitor — occasionally it pretends to, but then it reopens immediately. The only way I can get it to quit is to use NoTunes. This is insane. Nobody should have to write a utility to close a standard commonly used application on a modern operating system!

Search crashes the Music App

Another regular glitch is attempting any search crashes the Music app completely. It doesn’t matter if I’m looking in my library or Apple Music (iTunes Store seems to be exempt, though!), the app will panic and die. Of course, that then requires the automatic library check to kick in, during which time I can do nothing except wait. Why can’t this be a partially modeless activity? At least let me look at Listen Now, Browse Apple Music or reset my sound levels.

What’s with the 100,000 iCloud Library limit?

I’m old school. It comes from having lived abroad with crappy, expensive and low data allowances, which means I store all my music on external drives rather than streaming. My music library (my own music (ripped or purchased) and Apple Music tracks — I split out TV and Movies years ago) is now just under 1Tb in size with over 100,000 songs, split across 9000 albums by 2000 artists. So, it’s big, and it’s now subject to the ridiculous Apple restriction that an iCloud music library cannot contain more than 100,000 songs.

Let’s just quickly look at that restriction. Officially, that 100,000, apparently arbitrary limit, doesn’t include purchases from the iTunes Store. It says so in Apple’s documentation, although by all accounts, this is acknowledged by Apple support to be incorrect, and they keep saying that the documentation needs to be updated. If this were true, I wouldn’t have any problems because three-quarters of my music was purchased from iTunes! Even a 100,000-song library takes up less than 2Gb of space. As an Apple+ subscriber, I have access to 2Tb of storage, so that sounds like nonsense unless Apple Music developers simply cannot understand how to work with large libraries — which, in this day and age, also sounds like nonsense. It gets a little more bizarre, though. Under certain (random) circumstances, I can add music to the library. Sometimes just a song, sometimes a couple of albums, but mostly, I get an error message saying this addition would take me over the 100,000 song limit. Even more bizarrely, I can continue adding albums to my iOS devices, although they won’t appear in the macOS library. It’s the inconsistency that I hate.

Music randomly stops playing after a downloaded song ends

Now I’ve got that particular rant off my chest; here’s the real problem. When I play downloaded music, regardless of whether it was purchased or part of the Apple Music collection, I rarely get to listen to more than a couple of tracks before it stops playing. Usually, a track will finish, and another one or maybe two tracks will play before it all goes quiet. The progress bar will show the first track that failed and indicates that the song never started playing. At some stage in the process, Apple Music hangs briefly and then recovers but has lost its memory and can’t figure out what it’s doing. The only way to recover is to open Apple Music and physically stop the ‘current’ track, and either start playing it again or skip to another track. If like me, you are listening to music in the shower and this happens, there is nothing you can do. Even Siri can’t help because the system status has got so confused that it can’t work out what’s happening.

I have tried everything ever mentioned in the history of Apple Music and iTunes, but I cannot get over this. It happens on multiple M1 and Intel Macs. It happens with different drives and even the internal drive — I’m lucky enough to have a 2Tb SSD on my M1 13” MBP, which happened on that when I tested it. I have rebuilt the library from scratch. I downloaded every single track again. I’ve deleted caches. I reinstalled macOS time and time again, including a clean install.

The case for splitting Apple consumer apps out of macOS gets better by the day

And this last idea of having to download and reinstall the entire OS to fix a problem with one app is out of the dark ages of bad software design and delivery. It’s long gone time that Music, Mail, TV, Maps, Home, Photos and maybe even Messages, Safari, FaceTime, Calendar and Contacts were all built and delivered as stand-alone apps, just like Pages, Numbers and Keynote. As a developer back in the day, the mantra was always to decouple code and subsystems as much as possible so that a problem with one part had as little effect as possible on the system as a whole. Why do the developers of the consumer apps need to work to the same delivery cadence as the macOS team? That’s simply bad management. iOS allows you (these days) to install just about any Apple app independently of the OS. It’s high time the mothership caught up! Even if they are unwilling to change the cycle of releases, at least let us delete and reinstall consumer apps via the Mac App Store!

With the Far Out event due to take place next week (September 7th) and the imminent release of Ventura, I’m hoping that some of these problems may magically disappear. But I’m not going to hold my breath! Failing that, it may be the next best thing will be a clean install of Ventura rather than an update — and then see what new problems I’ll encounter! Better the devil you know?

Oops - I(Tunes) Did It Again...

Another new operating system for the Mac and another half baked version of iTunes...

The Apple Harvest has never shied away from commenting on the mess that iTunes has become. It's hardly a lone voice either. But it would appear that none of the professional or personal voices are being heard by Apple. Or if they are, they are not being listened to.

In my day job I'm a business improvement consultant. I help companies understand their problems and give them ideas on how to solve them. I help them look for opportunities where they may be blinkered. I also help them manage change, and one of my golden rules is "Continuous Tinkering is not Continuous Improvement". I even wrote a post about it on one of my other blogs.

Apple have well and truly got into the rut of continuous tinkering when it comes to iTunes. Each step forward (and I genuinely do like some of the things they do each time a new release comes out) results in a number of steps backwards.

It really is time for one giant step change for the product team who need to throw away the legacy  and start again from scratch.

So what exactly has upset me with this latest version of iTunes?

• Technology now allows us to see over a billion colours on a screen but Apple insist on using white backgrounds for everything. Now I know that not everyone liked the colour option of iTunes 11, but it was a preference and they could turn it off. Now we have no choice - we have to have our eyes blown out by blindingly white backgrounds (same goes for the Notification Centre - brilliant white only)
• For You used to be really quite an attractive option - the only thing I like about this new incarnation is the inclusion of new music
• It used to be really easy to flick between an artist's music in your library and that on Apple Music that isn't in your library - now it's virtually impossible without having to make notes. OK, not a problem with a small library, but I have over 4000 albums, and I don't have an eidetic knowledge of which albums by which artists I have in my library
• When I click on the first track of an album I expect to be able to play the album and then finish. I don't want the next 'n' tracks in my library to appear in the current play list
• It would be quite useful to have better visibility of the current playlist in general - for example I would love to be able to delete a selection of songs without having to delete each one individually (and have it replaced by the next song in the library)
• Play Later seems to only be available under certain conditions - I'm not yet entirely sure what they are
• Who on earth decided that the Shuffle option should be turned on by default? 
• Pre-ordered albums with a few songs available seem to exist in an alternative universe to all other albums - pulling in tracks from other albums/singles and EPs 
• The Recently Added library list shares none of the characteristics of other items like Albums or Artists

Then, of  course, there are the bugs that still cause problems especially the iCloud Music Library option unchecking itself at random.

I could probably, just about, live with any one of these, and try and establish workarounds for them, but as a whole, they make using iTunes a proverbial pain in the butt! The Music app in iOS 10 has another set of quirks, but at least the overall experience is more consistent than iTunes.

Apple seems to have forgotten that not all users listen to music the same way - those of us with large downloaded libraries, particularly those of us who are album oriented, listen to our music in a different way to those who stream singles and odd songs. In different circumstances, our listening methods change, but Apple is seemingly forcing us into a specific way of listening to our music and is removing the flexibility for us to take back any control. 

But above all - it would be great not to have to constantly have to relearn how to use an application that is so fundamental to so many users every time a new release comes out. We actually want consistency and continuity - we don't want constantly changing ways of doing the basic things we've been doing for years. Some things don't need innovation - they just need to do what they're supposed to do. And with a minimum of fuss and effort on our part!

So, please Apple, either redesign iTunes from scratch, or give us the flexibility to tweak it to suit ourselves. But please, above all....stop tinkering and pretending that its an improvement! 

iTunes - Time for A Major Makeover

Just over four years ago I posted an article about iTunes and how I'd spent a week trying to recover from a series of iTunes induced cock-ups. Following the latest update to 12.3.3 I've spent another week trying to recover from another set of iTunes induced cock-ups.

If iTunes was an old pet we would probably have taken it to the vet by now and put it out of its misery. Sadly Apple doesn't perceive iTunes as old pet but some kind of sacred cow which must be kept alive in its current state regardless of its pain. In fact, iTunes is turning into a kind of dangerous dog, like a Pit Bull Terrier, which should be put to sleep before it inflicts both physical and mental damage to its owner.

Years ago, when I was cutting code we had a similar problem with our commercial set of programmes. They had  originally been written for the MS-DOS platform, then hurriedly converted to Windows 3 and were constantly being expanded and modified. After about five years we took the decision to call it a day and re-architect and re-engineer the entire portfolio before it imploded and became impossible to salvage. There was a business requirement as well as a technical requirement, in that a new bunch of players had come into the market and were starting from scratch, making our offerings looking tired, slow and very sad.

It really is time that Apple took a similar approach with iTunes. The whole platform needs re-architecting and re-engineering in order to make it a better solution for it customers. Many iTunes users, like myself, don't really have the luxury of moving to a different solution. My music library, which relies heavily on playlists, iMatch (and more recently Apple Music) now stands at about 45,000 songs. The video library of films and TV shows is just over a terabyte. The whole library consumes about 1.7Tb. And just like our old portfolio, iTunes has grown out of control and has been showing signs of imploding for at least four years. The rate of decline is now growing even faster, and it's time to take urgent action.

So, what is behind this latest call for an iTunes re-design?

After the 12.3.3 update I had a few teething problems with my music library. (As an aside, and to be fair, the video and TV libraries don't appear to have been affected, but then again, I tend not to pay so much attention to them). These teething problems then turned into a big, big, problem. A 54Gb problems to be precise. For some reason, during the update, the options to use Apple Music and iCloud Music Library were deselected. Every time I tried to re-enable them iTunes would crash. Eventually I signed out of iTunes and signed in again. I could now enable the two options, but to my horror about half my Apple Music downloads were now showing as not downloaded. They hadn't been deleted from the hard drive, but they were definitely missing in iTunes.

The only obvious way to fix this was to delete the problem albums and redownload but this meant going through every folder in my Apple Music library to find out the offending items, and then spending hours doing the downloads. There had to be a better way - I just had no idea what it was. So I got in touch with Apple iTunes Support via Twitter. We spent the next three days going nowhere as they asked me question after question about my setup - which I'd already explained right at the start. I felt completely patronised, and in the end they couldn't help anyway. I not even sure they understood the problem.

I now realise that I'm not the only one with problems - and to be honest I actually feel quite lucky. At least I have a workaround to fix my problem. It would appear that there a many folk out there who don't, short of starting from scratch (or abandoning iTunes altogether).

iTunes does not play well when it's trying to do too many things. The program should be streamlined into its components at least - Apple Music, Apple Video and the Apple Store. iTunes doesn't play well with large music libraries and the system should be more rigorously tested against very large libraries, which I think will become increasingly common with Apple Music. Apple Tunes Match is still suffering from bugs reported over four years ago - once or twice a week I have to clean up my music library to eliminate the issue of songs with a valid last played days but a zero play count. Even as I write this, over 14500 songs are showing this erroneous attribute. Additionally, most people need external storage for their media libraries because of their sheer size, and I'm sure that this is one of the major contributing factors in iTunes failures - the programme simply wasn't optimised to work with external volumes. This is a critical aspect that needs addressing.

Given that iTunes is probably one of the three most used of the stock OS X applications, along with Safari and Mail, it's about time that it worked without so many problems.

I've now fixed the issue with my library but it has been time consuming and painful. I have a relatively slow internet connection in Prague, but at least it is unlimited. If I been on a capped service, I might still be trying to resolve the problem into next year! But how I miss my 200Mbps connection at Apple Harvest HQ!

It Just Works

The phrase "it just works" is most closely associated with Apple since Steve Jobs repeatedly used it in his WWDC 2011 keynote. He was talking specifically about iCloud but the slogan has been used to describe just about everything Apple, both in positive and negative ways.

In my experience, 99% of the time it is quite an accurate description. Right now, I'm at the alternative Apple Harvest HQ, with about 75% of my full HQ infrastructure set up. Mavericks 10.9.2 is now out of beta, and all my apps, plugins and drivers all seem to be "just working" fine.

Even some of my long term bugbears about iTunes seem to have disappeared since my last post. My "Discrepancies" playlist which is set up to catch the iTunes Match error whereby a song has a last played date but 0 play counts, and "Discrepancies 2" which catches songs with a play count but no Last Played date have been empty for a few weeks, and even the old bug where play counts didn't get updated if the Crossfade Songs preference was turned on has been fixed.

Mail 7.2 is fully operational with my favourite add-ons (with the sad exception of DockStar) and the UI modification apps, Flavours and DockMod (both previously mentioned in this blog), have both been updated to work properly with 10.9.2.

Now that all is rosy in the Apple Harvest garden I've decided that the MacBook Air will no longer be used for beta versions of OS X - a very timely decision since 10.9.3 has just been seeded to developers this very morning!

(Rant Alert) It's easy to knock Apple when bugs appear in the OS regardless of which version it is. But I do get angry when people use inappropriate language to slag off developers. OS X is an incredibly large and complex system, which ultimately has to run on an infinite set of configurations. There will be problems with some set-ups, just as there are with Windows and other operating systems. And it's not unreasonable for frustration to take over from time to time. What is unreasonable is for people who have no idea of the effort that developers put in to creating their work to make unpleasant accusations. Sadly some people are never going to be mature enough to realise that trolling on the internet serves only to highlight their own ignorance and insecurities. (End Rant)

Two great new games made it onto the iOS devices this weeks - Lyne and Threes. Both are cerebral, pattern matching games (for want of a better description), and both are highly addictive. I've had to put a limit on the number of games in succession I have on Threes because it's making me light headed! It's also a serious battery gobbler.

You've been warned!

iTunes and iOS7 Music Apps Need Some TLC

Earlier this week Apple released iTunes 11.1.4  - a minor release which appeared to do absolutely nothing different - even the widely publicised change which decoupled the Wish List from iTunes Store was missing in action. Personally, I couldn't give two hoots about where the wish list is stored or managed. I'd much rather Apple picked on some bugs that would actually make a difference to the whole Music listening experience.

I confess to rather liking iTunes - and at the time of writing I've not found a better media player on the Mac, although Vox 2 has just been released. (For the record, I was a big fan of WinAmp back in the days when I used PCs.) I've regularly commented on the bug fixes around iMatch that I'd like to  have fixed once and for all, so I won't repeat them yet again. I've created a Keyboard Maestro macro to partially overcome the problem of corrupted play counts, but the fact is that my iTunes library metadata has now become so corrupt that it bears little resemblance to reality anyhow. So, I might as well stop thinking about it.

I still see iTunes as an all round media player so I'm not necessarily in favour of splitting out different media types into separate players like some folk (and like iOS). Especially as there is no need to keep all your media types in a single library - I currently do, but I'm thinking about splitting out music from TV and Films. I would, however, be happier if OS X took the same approach as iOS and stopped using iTunes as the shop front for iOS apps and media. I can't really see the point of keeping reference copies of all my iOS apps on my Mac (except of course when they are no longer available from the App Store, although even then,  I'm not sure that I really want to keep apps that are no longer supported).

What I'd really like right now is for the Music app on iOS7 to get some serious TLC. My biggest current issue is the shared library function - I cannot get my iTunes Home Share library to load and play on any of my iDevices. On my first generation iPad Mini, the library (usually) eventually loads but tells me it's empty. On the iPhone 5, the library loads but as soon as I select an album to play, it fast forwards through the songs without playing a note. On my iPad 3 the remote library never even fully loads. Without being able to use my main music library remotely, my play counts get even more out of alignment with reality as play counts of iMatch songs don't get recorded or reflected back anywhere.

I'd also like the Music app to be able to sort items without having to refer back to the settings and I want more sort options, like sort by album or song title - and is it really too much to ask to have a search facility within the Music app itself? Lastly, it would great if the shuffle function worked on the currently selected album, or artist, not the currently playing song. For those of us with large music libraries (and fading memories!) some of these basic abilities become more and more of a necessity and less of a wish list.

And given that iDevices are more popular than iPods these days, the least that Apple can do is make the music software as usable as it is on my iPod Classic...

...and "just works".

My Top 6 OS X Pre Mavericks Bug Fixes

I can't wait until the autumn when OS X Mavericks arrives (hopefully!). From what I've seen and read so far, the highlights for me are :

• Proper multi-display handling (why so long?)
• Searchable tags in Finder (again why so long?)
• Improved notification support (especially across devices)
• iCloud Keychain (with reservations)

But before we get too excited about these 'innovations' (let's face it these aren't genuine innovations, they are integrated improvements which in many cases are already available through 3rd party software (e.g. Tags, 1Password), I hope Apple have gone through the support logs, bug reports and forums, although the latter may be a misguided hope) to find out what still needs fixing after multiple incarnations of OS X.

I have six areas I've singled out for attention. They aren't real show stoppers but they are annoying because of their longevity, and the fact that they do appear to affect thousands of users. So here are my top six bugbears (in no significant order)

iTunes / iMatch

I love iMatch. My music library alone has over 27,000 songs in it, which is clearly impossible to keep on anything other than a Mac with a 250Gb drive, and certainly not on any iOS devices. Even my 160Gb iPod classic has already gone overdrawn (unless you listen to nothing but 3 minute pop songs the estimate of 40,000 songs in your pocket is a clear overestimate). But my  number one bug with iMatch is the way that play counts get screwed up everytime iMatch weaves its magic. Last played dates remain intact but play counts are re-zeroed. This seems to happen pretty much at random - I can't see any patterns. Sometimes 100 songs are affected, sometimes it's as many as 17,000. But many of my smartlists use play counts and I have to rely on Doug's Apple Scripts for iTunes to fix the problem to make these smart lists work properly. OK, it's not mission critical, but as a former programmer I can't believe this is anything more than a five minute fix.

Another issue I have with iTunes is that I'd like to see the same viewing options in the Home Sharing that I have in the dedicated library support, specifically regarding playlists. I think this is an omission rather than a bug, but I'd like to see my home share playlists as something more than a plain list.

Final iTunes gripe is the amount of time it takes to check the integrity of the iTunes library after a crash or improper exit. Please find a way to speed this up - it can take 10 minutes or so on a really large library, and I want to listen to my music now!

Mac App Store

I've documented the problem with the Mac App Store in a previous post, but this bug is still lurking and it would appear to be due to Apple linking the internal store data to the user's spotlight index. So, when the spotlight index gets corrupted, for whatever reason, the Mac App Store can't work out which apps are installed, which need updating or which new apps should be installed. If Apple used a separate index for the Mac App Store app rather than relying on spotlight I would expect this bug to disappear. Again, this situation can usually be resolved by rebuilding the spotlight index, but this can take hours, and the user shouldn't have to understand how this works in order to be able to update their apps.

Time Machine

There are a few issues that regularly occur with Time Machine backups but I'm guessing this is not an easy problem to fix. Nevertheless, I would argue that anything to do with backing up your system can be classed as mission critical and as such I would urge Apple to look closely at some of the more common problems. My two favourites ("?"!!) are "Time Machine Disk cannot be found" and "Sparse.bundle already in use".

In both cases, for me at least, rebooting the Time Capsule (or sometimes the modem/router) will almost always fix the problem, but takes down the system at the same time since the TC device is my wireless router.

Integrity of Time Machine backups is paramount and while the backup and restore system usually works perfectly, there are enough glitches for me not to have complete confidence that my systems are 100% safe without taking additional steps like regularly cloning disks.

Networking

There's a well reported issue with network access being lost when a Mac goes to sleep. Apparently Apple are aware of some significant problems in this space and the last couple of 10.8.x betas have asked developers to look out for changes in this area. It seems a shame that Apple have included the 'power nap' feature in Mountain Lion but many people can't take advantage of it since they have no network once the machine is asleep. Maybe this will be fixed in the forthcoming 10.8.5 release - fingers and ethernet cables crossed! At present I'm getting round the problem by using a 3rd party app called Sleepless but this comes with a potential overheating health warning (especially in this hot weather!).

AirPlay

I've also documented AirPlay problems on this blog in the past. AirPlay is one of those funny things - it either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, it just seems a matter of starting everything again. Some improved diagnostics would be really helpful (unlike Error -1500 …) if nothing else.

Safari

This is a relatively new issue that I've noticed where sometimes Safari just partially freezes. The menu works, scrolling works, selecting tabs works but noe of the controls on a page work. Buttons can't be pressed, input fields can't be filled. This only appears to be on certain sites - I have most problems with the Amazon login page. The only fix I have to date is to restart Safari.


As I've indicated, none of these problems is without a work around, and none are that critical (exception possibly being Time Machine). But they do cause interruptions, they force me to spend time fixing them when I could be doing something more productive - and overall they detract from the whole Apple OS X experience, where stuff just works!

Any specific bugs you'd like to see fixed before Mavericks? Drop me a note via the comments or @allygill on Twitter so we can compare notes.

Enjoy the summer!

Silence Is Golden - Update

Almost immediately after posting my last article, iTunes stopped sending AirPlay signals to my Airport Express device. I felt a bit like the Apple ecosystem had become a petty minded sentient being who was taking the mickey. Once again I went through each and every one of the possible fixes I have accumulated over the past few weeks but to no avail. Nothing I tried seemed to work.

But then a bit of serendipity took place. I recently downloaded a small menu bar utility called Output (available from the Mac App Store - 69p) which simply allows you to easily select input/output devices from a drop down list of available devices. I regularly swap output devices so this is a godsend saving the hassle of having to either go into the System Preferences or remember to hit the Alt button when selecting the volume icon.

Output showed the Airport Express as one of the available output devices and when I selected it, lo and behold, iTunes played out through the stereo system downstairs. It's not true Airplay since you can only select a single output device at a time, but it demonstrated that my system was actually OK and that it was most likely an iTunes issue.

Once I'd established that the problem appeared to be an iTunes bug, it meant I could stop spending (wasting?) hours trying to fix it if it recurred. As if by magic, shortly after that, the problem resolved itself, and then later in May a new minor version of iTunes appeared (11.0.3) and I've not seen the problem since.

Has iTunes been fixed? No clues from Apple in that respect in the release notes. Which is another reason for disliking some of Apple's reluctance to be more open about its software. We never get to see whether bugs have been addressed (and potentially fixed for eternity), or whether they've just disappeared for a while but may reappear in the future. As a former developer, I've always tried to be open about known bugs which have been fixed, whilst trying to be clear that sometimes the little beggars will show up again. This helps prevent people from suing you, and it's a stance I wish more big companies would take - including Apple!

Is iTunes Suffering from Senility?

I lost a great deal of last week repeatedly messing about with iTunes. When I say messing about with iTunes, what I really mean is fixing the mess that iTunes caused with absolutely no intervention from me.

This is just the latest episode of a long running series of mishaps with iTunes, which I can only see continuing ad nauseam like Coronation Street or Eastenders for as long as I continue to  add content (purchased via iTunes or otherwise).

Don't get me wrong. As a piece of functional software I quite like iTunes. Most of the time it does what it is supposed to do. It does it without much prompting from me, and I've not resorted to using Doug's Scripts to add functionality - only to fix cock-ups (more on that later). I use the excellent Cover Sutra app to display my current selection on the screen, and I use Cover Scout 3 to fix artwork when it's missing or I think it can be improved on. Sometimes I run TuneUp and I used to use TuneRanger a lot when trying to sync between computers but even this has been superseded by iMatch (after a fashion).

So iTunes as a daily operational programme is fine...until something goes wrong and when it does it's generally catastrophic.

Let's step back in time for a moment. When PCs were first readily available either as business or home user devices they were pretty limited. A 20Mb hard disk was considered quite large and 256Kb of RAM was a fairly standard configuration. These limits were enforced by processor and operating system constraints. Software workarounds were available but were messy. These days of course we walk around with tiny 1Tb hard disks in our laptop bags in addition to 500Gb internal drives and RAM is also measured in Gb. Which is just as well, because my music collection alone currently weighs in at 140Gb and my video library is approaching 400Gb. Experience has taught me to keep the two seperate as a damage limitation exercise. The problem is that we just assume that programmes can cater for ever increasing file sizes, and I am not convinced that this is a safe assumption.

Some more history: whilst on my first tour of duty in Switzerland my iTunes music library on my laptop had a semi fatal hiccup and a whole bunch of purchased music went AWOL. My Time Machine backup also failed catastrophically. In all I lost about 12 albums worth of music - not whole albums mind - just a few songs off each one. I contacted Apple support, who to their credit, have always been remarkably helpful and made stuff available within a few hours with no questions asked. This time they made everything available - all 5000 songs and 100 TV shows/films. It was actually too helpful, because of course, in those days you had no control over what should or shouldn't be downloaded. It was all or nothing.

As I only had mobile internet access in Zurich there wasn't much I could do until I got home. It then took in the region of a week download everything. And another week to sort the mess out - weeding out duplicates and trying to merge previous backups to try and restore the old metadata - like original date added and  playcounts. (A similar thing happened last year in Zurich but just a few songs went missing, and it was possible to redownload them without going through Apple support thanks to the Purchases option in iTunes store.)

In fact, to this day, I still don't really know whether I got everything right, but it doesn't matter anymore because last week something similar happened. This time it appeared to be down to a glitch in iMatch. I subscribed to iMatch the day it was first unavailable in the UK (shortly after it appeared in the UK and us early birds signed up, it disappeared for 24 hours!).

By now my music library had grown to 16000 songs, but it was a similar random access attack on the library - only a few whole albums vanished, mainly it was a handful of songs from a large selection of my purchased. Running Doug's List MIAs script showed that nearly 600 items were missing. This time I had access to a working backup which I duly restored overnight. When I checked in the morning everything was back as expected. Until I loaded iTunes later in the day and the same thing had happened - with exactly the same selection of songs.

After a week of messing about with backups, restores, redownloading tracks and rebuilding libraries, I finally have a complete library again. Or at least as complete as I can get it. I've messed around trying to get as much of the metadata looking right thanks to Doug's scripts (particuarly New Play Count and Last Played Date). Sadly the two most useful metadata items for me, Date Added and Purchased Date are not available for me to use the way I want to. I can't change the Date Added field because it's read-only, except to iTunes internally and I can't use the Purchase Date in a SmartList. The Date Added field is a real bummer because everytime I have to rebuild a library the value that gets stored is the current date. So I have some albums with different tracks showing different Date Added values. I could live with that if I could use the Purchase Date to create a SmartList but that isn't an option. I know there's a Doug Script to copy the Purchase Date into the comments field but I haven't got around to trying it yet.

I really wonder how many more times this is going to happen to me. I think that iTunes needs a complete internal overhaul, because I don't believe it is any longer capable of handling these enormous databases and that is causing these catastrophic corruptions. If the application doesn't get a rewrite at least Apple should provide us with diagnostics and repair facilities to make life a bit easier. Manually fixing a 16000 song library is time consuming and painful (not to mention error prone).

Oh, and give me read access to the Purchase Date!

Thumbs up for Apple iTunes Customer Support!

Apple’s customer service sometimes seems like a two-headed monster. When it’s bad, it’s very bad but when it’s good, it’s about as good as it can get. I have only had the need to contact them on one occasion, which was about a week ago. I had downloaded some TV programmes from the iTunes store as my limited access to Swiss TV was becoming overloaded by Champions League football and a marked drop in the number of programmes being shown with an English soundtrack option.

In particular I’d earmarked The Red Riding trilogy shown earlier this year in the UK, which had good reviews and had captured my imagination. When I was back at home a couple of weekends ago I took the opportunity to download the 3Gb of programming, along with some other goodies, and was looking forward to watching the trilogy over a few nights the following week.

On my return to Zurich, I noticed that iTunes was showing duplicates of each of the episodes and given my lack of hard disk spaces I did a clean up. When I then came to watch the shows I got an error telling me that the originals were no longer available. And because my iTunes library already weighs in at 70Gb, I had excluded it from my Time Machine backups.

So no Red Riding…

I contacted Apple Support and detailed the problem in an email. Within a couple of days I received a reply from Arran asking confirming his understanding of the problem and asking me for the order details. I was a little busy at the time, and didn’t get round to replying immediately, but 24 hours later I got a second mail repeating the request. This time I managed to send a reply, and within a few hours the shows were made available to me again at no charge.

With limited bandwidth, there was no way that I could download the material while still in Zurich, so I wrote back asking if there was any time limit for downloading the replacements, and indicating that I would be able to perform the download within a fortnight. Again I received a reply within an hour or so, confirming that this was not a problem, and that the shows would be available for download for as long as required.

Last weekend I finally got the material back onto the laptop and I’m looking forward to finally getting round to watching the series. I hope it’s going to be worth all the effort!

Update:

Between writing this entry and actually publishing it, I’ve had a second opportunity to put the iTunes support guys to the test, and once again they’ve come up trumps. I downloaded the Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album by The Beatles on my iPad to mark the occasion of The Beatles music finally being available for download. Everything seemed to work OK but when I later linked the iPad to the MBP only the video was there – all the songs were missing. This time I contacted support via the Report a Problem in iTunes, but the outcome was very similar. Some mails acknowledging the problem and confirming the issue and a day later a mail explaining that the missing material was available for me to re-download at no extra cost.  Thanks to Daniel on this occasion.

I’ve also managed to lose Red Riding again, but this time I know there’s a backup at home!