iTunes Music File Stops After a Few Seconds

My wife gave me an iTunes card for Chirstmas so I went today to use it…little did I know what was going to happen. I poked around to find something to buy and picked out Journey’s Greatest Hits Vol 1 & 2 – I lost my Escape CD years ago. I had an existing credit in the store of about 13 bucks – not enough for the album. I banged in my code for the gift card – it appeared…but my $13 disappeared!

Calm Down – its Apple

Ok – no biggie I’ll just call customer service. Uhh…I guess I will not call customer service…there is no number. WTF? They have my money and I have to send an email and wait at least 48 hours for a response. Ok…its Apple – they love customers – I’ll wait since I still have $25 I can get my music still.

Corruption….d’oh

I downloaded the album and thought all was well. I ran about doing some stuff with the music playing – I wasn’t paying attention too much. Came back and sat down for the last song to hear it cut out after about 10-15 seconds. I checked all the songs and 5 of the 30 songs were messed up and wouldn’t play.

Still maintaining a sense of calm, I figure – ok just download them again. Uh – you can’t! WTF? I google around on “corrupted iTunes songs” or “iTunes song stops after a few seconds”. There’s one article copied and pasted onto a bizillion sites that says to delete the stuff in your downloads/TMP folder. Uh…don’t got one of those. All those posts don’t seem to pertain to Windows 7.

Breathing deep…ugh…my dealer called in the middle of all this to tell me they got the wrong seal for the rear differential on my car so it wil be another day without my car….ok that does it!

How to Fix Things?

The next best advice I could find on the internet, the Apple site, or the forums was to contact Apple customer service (yes another 48 hour deal with email). Screw that! Here’s what you do:

1. Take a deep breath, be careful, and backup everything…especially your music files.
2. Update iTunes to the very latest – start it up and then close it down.
3. Go into My Music and iTunes and backup anything “library” in the name and also the “bk” directory. I copied these to somewhere else on the machine.
4. Go into your iTunes Music directory find the messed up songs and move them somewhere else – do not leave a copy here. Confirm that the songs are messed up in another media player – I used Nero’s player.
5. Startup iTunes and under “Store” click “Purchased”.
6. Go to the songs in iTunes try to play them – they will get an error and an icon
7. Delete the songs from iTunes
8. Click “Download Previous Purchases”
9. Click on “Not in My Library”
10. iTunes will list the songs you just deleted
11. Highlight each song and a download link should appear.
12. Song will download and you should be good to go.

I performed this on Win7 64 Home Premium with iTunes 10.5.2 – no clue if this will work on other versions or OS’s. I do not have the iCloud crap working either.

Yo Apple – how about a big page or FAQ on this? Now where’s my $13???