He who sees, but is not seen

Yes, folks, it is true.

iTunes deleted all my music. All of it. Even stuff I downloaded through iTunes is gone.

I had nearly 14 gigs of music on my PC, 6 of it downloaded through iTunes. After the damage has been assessed, I am left with two 30 Seconds to Mars albums and a song by Judas Priest.

‘But Ian!’ I hear you say ‘How do you know iTunes deleted your music?’

Here’s how it goes. I organized my music folder manually, by artist, to the way I liked it. Unfortunately, iTunes does not have a folder mirror option, and so it was completely confused. ‘Where did all his music go? It’s like it vanished!’ it seemed to say. When requesting to play a track, it gives you the option of manually finding the file associated with it and updating the registry. Find me someone who is willing to do that, track by track, for 14 gigs of music.

So I figured ‘I’ll have iTunes reorganize my folder, so it knows where everything is. I might not like the result, because a lot of my music has bad filenames, but at least iTunes will know where everything is.’ And so that’s what I proceed to do. Under Edit>Preferences>Advanced, I click on ‘Keep iTunes folder organized’. I click ok.

And lo, says He, let my music files beith wherst thou shalt!

But no. iTunes still can’t find the files.

Confused, I open my music folder in Windows Explorer, to discover nothing has changed. At least, nothing on the surface has changed. The first warning flag goes up when I notice my Pink Floyd folder is missing. I begin to open up folders.

Each one I open is empty. Empty. My entire music folder and all it’s subdirectories; empty. Nothing. It’s all gone, save for those 30 Seconds to Mars’ albums and that song Devil’s Child by Judas Priest (which I wasn’t aware I even had).

I try to remain calm. ‘iTunes just moved it to a different directory. It’s still here, it’s ok.’ But a simple Search through the start menu reveals that no, iTunes did not, in fact, move the music. Oh, no. It simply deleted it.

You cannot imagine the anger that this instills in me. The icing on the cake is I have to pay to replace all the songs I lost. Yessir; doesn’t matter if I already paid for and downloaded Jeff Buckley’s Grace album. I have to pay the 9.99 again if I want it back.

So, here’s what it boils down to. FUCK YOU iTUNES. FUCK YOU APPLE. FUCK YOU iPOD. FUCK YOU CORPORATE AMERICA.

I’m buying a Zune.