Bubba Murarka

I’ve been trying to recover some music previously purchased on iTunes but on a laptop that I no longer have access to.  Turns out this isn’t possible based on this email from Apple support:

Thank you for purchasing music from the iTunes Store. I apologize, but I am unable to place this item back in your download queue.We encourage you to back up your hard disk regularly. If a song needs to be replaced, you can restore your music and other data from the backup and avoid the need to purchase replacement copies of your collection of songs.

You can find instructions on backing up your music below.

Backing up your music files in iTunes
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93033

The iTunes Store Terms of Sale can be found at http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/legal/policies.html.

I am sure this some well known iTunes store issue and acutally the RIAA’s fault for forcing no-re-downloads.  But seriously, WTF?   Best part is the last link in the email takes you to a 404 error (it includes the trailing “.”).  After I figured that out and got to the policy page, I couldn’t even find the fine print in the document that told me about not being able to re-download tunes previoulsy bought. 

The above + the all of the bad itunes meta data because of the whole artist vs. album artist has got me inclined to ditch iTunes for good (but not my iPod Touch…it is wicked cool).