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March 4, 2014 - 4:11pm

#1

NeutronStar

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When disaster happens

Recently I lost my iTunes folder containing all the music.

I had a fault in my iMac and I was forced to restore it from the Time Machine backup.

Everything, except the about 200 GB of music (and 1 ringtone) could be restored, the music unfortunately could not be found in any of the backups.

Most of the music I love was ripped from CDs and could be restored by ripping them again (this time in loss less formats, ALAC).

I had also some online purchases from Linn, Analektta, HDTracks and iTunes.

The Linn and Analecta sites allow to download again the purchased albums.

iTunes was kind enough to reactivate all my downloads upon receiving an email from me.

Unfortunately HDtracks (highly recommended by Stereophile and probably the biggest library of High Definition tracks and albums) has so far refused to allow me to download again the about 30 albums that I paid for.

I do not understand why considering that I have all receipts, the tracks have no DRM and their online records show all my purchases. (I could recover about 50% from old hard disks and copies I found in my restored folders but the rest is definitely gone)

Also to be fair HDtracks allowed me to get back my last 2 purchases and claims that they are unable to enable me to download the rest for "technical reasons"

From now on I am going to purchase online only from sites that allow to download the music again if needed and recommend to the fellow audiophiles that read this to do the same and to give priority to "hard copies" (i.e. CDs, SACDs or Vynil)

If other readers had similar experiences I will appreciate if you share them through this forum

March 5, 2014 - 6:20am

#2

JoeE SP9

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Downloads

Thanks for the "heads up" about HD Tracks policy.

You may want to consider a different music program for your Mac. What you experienced with iTunes is not an isolated instance.

March 5, 2014 - 11:56pm

#3

Glotz

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Wow. Very sorry that happened to you.

I cannot fathom why these companies want to alienate their paying customer base.

I'm not sure I could go through the process of re-downloading that music over again.

I wonder what the hypothetical 'loss' rate of lost downloads is overall compared to disasters destroying LP's and CD's.

The title of the Dead Kennedy's album 'Give Me Convienence Or Give Me Death' takes on yet another meaning.

Death, please.

March 6, 2014 - 8:28am

#4

jazzfan

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Backup EVERYTHING!

Another fine example of why maintaining one's own personal backup copy (or copies for the very paranoid) is very important - even with a Mac.

And another fine example of why iTunes should only be used to manage the music on one's iPod, iPhone and/or iPad. Otherwise one encounters probelms like this.

One thing I would suggeat that you do before you start to rerip your CD collection (and ripping to lossless is a very good idea) is rip everything to two external hard drives (the main working drive and a full mirrored backup drive) - that way whatever happens to the computer will not effect the data on the external hard drives.

And yes, HDTracks policy is a bit user unfriendly but then again one should have a backup copy of everything and not need to re-download from HDTracks.

March 7, 2014 - 7:37am

#5

Bill B

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Sounds

Sounds like iTunes was not the problem here, original poster says it was a computer problem. And that iTunes let him re-download their tracks that he had lost.

March 8, 2014 - 5:13am

#6

jazzfan

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What no backup!

Bill B wrote:

Sounds like iTunes was not the problem here, original poster says it was a computer problem. And that iTunes let him re-download their tracks that he had lost.

Perhaps not but as JoeE SP9 stated "What you experienced with iTunes is not an isolated instance." - which I concur with since my experience over the years of participation on various audio related forums is that iTunes can very tricky at times.

In any case, whether of not it was or wasn't the fault of iTunes, the real fault lies with the original poster for not a complete and useable backup set.