Corona | Coming Attractions

The first thing I'd do is go to your iTunes Library, copy it, and put it on an external hard drive. Your library should still be there, despite not being accessible through iTunes. Then I'd go into the folders on the external hard drive and make sure that there were no remnants of the new songs or files copied to the new library on the external hard drive. You might as well go to the original folder and do the same. Make sure every little bit of every newly downloaded song is gone. You should be able to do all this with iTunes closed. None of this fixes the problem, but it does give you an extra copy of your files so you don't have to worry about losing everything for the time being.

From there I would suggest first retrying iTunes with the original iTunes folder. Make sure iTunes is genuinely, completely closed before you attempt to reopen it. If you have a PC, you can do this by hitting Ctrl+Shift+Esc and shutting it down with the Task Manager. You could also just restart your computer. Run a virus sweep in the meantime, clean your registry, and do whatever else you normally do to your computer when it is behaving poorly. If you own a Mac, do whatever the Mac version is of all that.

Done? All right. Now try it all again from the old iTunes folder and see if you are experiencing the same problem. If you are, I suggest re-routing your iTunes so that it accesses the library from the external hard drive (a drawn-out process, but nothing that's going to require computer wizardry; Google it if you've never done it). If that doesn't work, I suggest completely deleting iTunes from your hard drive (while keeping the iTunes music folder), reinstalling it, and rebuilding your library.

If you're worried about the specific files you downloaded being the culprit, download them from somewhere other than iTunes. (If you don't know where to find them, tell me which ones they are and I can probably find them for you for free. If you are the kind of person who feels guilty getting things for free, consider this: you have already paid for them, and you are allowed one free backup copy of every song you own by most first world western country's laws. [Check Britain's anti-piracy laws just to make sure this is true for you, too.])

May God bless your loins with the power of 10 tigers!

Now, (stupid) question #2. Where the hell do I find the library. There was nothing that looked like it at c:\program files\iTunes or associated directories.

No, it's in c:\documents & settings\\Music\iTunes In fact, copy the entire iTunes directory.

Also, if you've got Vista or Win7, it's c:\users instead of c:\documents & settings\

er...that's c:\documents & settings\(username)\... I used < and > and it hid them.

What Jakester said.

I've said it before, and I will say it again: iTunes absolutely hates being on a PC. I think it thinks it's slumming.

(I realize iTunes can't think. If it could, it would realize how insulting and snobbish it is to think it's slumming on a PC. It's an Apple product, though, so maybe it has been indoctrinated since birth to think this way.)

Obama will fix it.

How is that "hopey" & "changey" thing working out for you?

I did have something else to say but washed my hands just now so have forgotten it?

iTunes, yeah, it hates PCs despite the fact it wouldn't be 1,000th of the revenue stream it is for Apple if it didn't end up on PCs.

Maybe I should buy an iPad purely for iTunes functionality. Oh, hang on, I can't transfer music from CD to iTunes via an iPad, can I? ARSE!

While I know you were joking, I don't think music discs have much longer to live. If Netflix and Redbox hadn't come along, the death of the DVD would have been right around the corner. It may still be. I discovered on a trip to Wal-Mart the other day that almost all non-boxed set, non-new release DVDs were on sale for five dollars. This includes movies that have only been on DVD for a year. It doesn't bode well for the DVD.

I'm not sure how long Blu-Ray has left. It probably only has as long as the industry can go without offering high definition downloads that don't eat up too much drive space. Once multiple terabyte drives (or solid high-def compression, or a combination of the two) are the norm, discs will be on their last legs. At that point, the only thing that will be keeping them around will be the people without fast connections and fast computers. There are more people like that out there than you might think. It may be a while, yet.

I am totally with you on that last point. Early adopters are all well and good, but for visual home entertainment I think there is more of an evolutionary leap required on the part of the user, and more technological barriers as well, especially outside certain parts of Asia, the US and Western Europe.

In Blockbuster here, Blu Ray now takes up as much space (more for new releases) as DVD. I think this is generally as good a barometer as any of the state of play between the formats.

And CD's can't die. My new car has a rather fantastic CD multi-changer built into the armrest so they have to survive, they just HAVE TO DAMMIT!

Although now you mention it, I did stock it up with 2 Ministry of Sound Mash-Ups from 2007, 3 discs of Tokyo Project (ex-Hed Kandi) stuff from Jan 2008, that bloody Linkin' Park & Jay-Z song on CD single, a Chemical Brothers album and some compilation bollocks that is at least a year old.

From this we can deduce that a) my taste in music sucks and b) I haven't bought any CD's for a while.

I recommend buying a few hundred CD-Rs while they're still around to be bought. That way, you can burn music to them and still put your armrest CD multi-changer to good use.

Does your new car not have an input jack for an mp3 player?

I think DVD/Blu-Ray will be around for some time to come. People like to feel like they "own" the movie still (even though the same doesn't hold for music so much). Plus, for HD, sure, you can stream HD movies from your PS3/Xbox, but only in 720p. Cable and satellite don't have the bandwidth to push the quality of their 1080p broadcasts to the level of visual and audio fidelity you get from a Blu-Ray film -- it's just not there. Also, a 720p download of a two-hour film runs at least 5gb. You're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15gb for a 1080p download, again, dependant on compression and audio quality.

The first actual "fatal error" Dalton has made is to pay for downloading music (chump!). The second fatal error Dalton has made is to use an Apple program in order to do this. The third fatal error Dalton has made is to try to use this Apple program to transfer his data to an Apple device.

The Swollen Goi... wrote:

Does your new car not have an input jack for an mp3 player?

According to the manual, yes it does. But I am buggered if I can find it. It also apparently has Blue Tooth all integrated but that does not behave as the manual would have you believe.

Oh, and the parking sensors were broken. So much for German engineering.

My Pa just upgraded to BluRay. He is 70. This is either an indicator of complete market penetration or a sign of the death of the format. I can't decide which!

Jakester wrote:

I think DVD/Blu-Ray will be around for some time to come. People like to feel like they "own" the movie still (even though the same doesn't hold for music so much).

You may be right, but I am finding that people are becoming less attached to owning things as things become cheaper and start taking up a lot of space. For most of my life, I've used my mother as a barometer for the direction in which things seem to be going. She has been a fairly successful barometer. Since DVDs cost so little these days, she has taken to buying them in bunches whenever she goes where they are sold. Lately, she has complained to me about how much space they take up, and how they keep floating around the house and falling prey to disorganization. She bought herself a laptop last year, and I put something like thirty movies and twenty audiobooks on it on it for her. Since then, she's been asking me if I would get digital copies of movies and books she wants so she doesn't have to bother with adding to the clutter. She, like me, doesn't care if things aren't in crystal hi def clarity. She just wants to be entertained.

My current stepfather is a little different. He likes the idea of hi def, but he doesn't seem to care for it as much as he thought he did before he owned a fancy hi def television and Blu-Ray player. My ex-stepsister bought my mother and stepfather both these things a year or so ago, and while my stepfather is proud of them both, and will show them off to guests, he often complains that things movies "don't look right" when he watches them on the system.

What are you guys listening to? I'm completely burned out on my music library.

Uhh...music.

As I may have mentioned once or twice, my daughter is big into The Ting Tings and The Bangles right now. There's a lot of that in the house.

I'm liking Liz Durrett a lot (http://www.lizdurrett.com) and have rediscovered the awesomeness of The Gin Blossoms as well.

Recent plays, according to iTunes:

Jacques Ibert, Concerto for Flute and Orchestra
Game Theory, Lolita Nation
The Crawdaddys, Crawdaddy Express
The Runaways, The Runaways
The The, Burning Blue Soul
Van Dyke Parks, Discover America
Greg Oblivian and the Tip-Tops, Head Shop
Grand Duchy, Petit Fours
She & Him, Volume One
Blake Babies, Sunburn
Oakley Hall, Gypsum Strings
Slapp Happy, Desperate Straights
Amon Düül II, Phallus Dei
Faust, Tapes
Faron Young, Hits

I could get behind something called "Lolita Nation."

I like the soundtrak for Iron Man!!!!!!!!!!

Downloading music is teh devil!!!

As it charges straight to your bank account and you don't physically pick up a CD, it's not like really buying it.

As a consequence, I now have far more Portuguese Cover versions of David Bowie songs on my iPod than I could ever possibly need! This is not a joke.

You make it sound like you're paying money for all the songs you're downloading.

I keep buying TV shows without thinking about it. I'm too scared of the recording industry to steal anything at all. I know it's illogical and that they can't track torrents or whatever, but a few kids in my high school got letters and the whole thing makes me jumpy.

I have never illegally downloaded a movie or a song in my life. Fact!

Unless you count p0rn movies.