7.2 and protected purchased songs...

[mrfizzed]

Ok so i like so many other people donwloaded and installed 7.2. WHAT A NIGHTMARE!!! I have since uninstalled and reinstalled 7.1.1 That works MUCH better. Here is my question though. Eventually we are going to have to install the newer versions and in doing that it looks lke all of those songs we have purchaed, burned to cd and then re ripped to mp3 format will now not play or transfer to the ipod from itunes. for those of who are not following this here is the deal. when you purchase a song on itunes, most of us will burn it to cd and then re rip it back so we have it as a mp3. i like probably many othersa then delete the oringial purchased song and just keep the mp3 so i have a uiniveral mp3 files. these songs play yfine in itunes and have always transferred to my ipod without issue. now in 7.2 they will playh in itunes but not ttransfer to the ipod. i have heard rumors of ways around this by re burning and then re ripping using another ripped or program. anyone have a work around for this? like i said i can stick with 7.1.1 for now but eventually will have to upgrade.

[studogvetmed]

I previous person who posted about this problem was able to fix the issue when I suggested to remove the problem songs from iTunes and readd them, it seemed to fix his issue.

The down side is you will have to keep track of your ratings and rerate them, and you will loose the date added and playcounts.

Some scripts out there can help you recoup the playcount if you write down what they were before deleting.

I can't quite explain why the issue comes up. Another issue could be to try to open the files in MP3trim and then save the file to rewrite it. This can sometimes fix small corruptions in the files that cause iTunes or the iPod to hate the files as suggested by another user here.

It could be just a very strange odd bug that could be fixed come the next release.

[Razor70]

I had not heard about this problem until just reading about it here. I never do the re-rip thing because I don't want to lose even more sound quality over what has already been taken out, but I can see where this could be a real problem for those that do. Hopefully Apple will hear about this and maybe add a patch to correct it. I believe that once a person buys their songs they should be able to do whatever they want too with them. So I hope that this wasn't something that Apple added in to stop people from doing this. Guess time will tell, but let's hope it's just a bug they will fix in a later patch.

[studogvetmed]

It would appear to be ones ripped back to MP3 affected only.

I had to rerip a Meat Loaf album I got from iTunes to fix a problem with sorting that was driving me batty (It was Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell ), but I rerip to AAC, and no issues.

[Jesse Hollington]

It's definitely a bug, and not anything that's being done deliberately.

Depending on how you burned and re-ripped, the likely result was that the iTunes database entry for that file may still have contained tags that identified the original purchased file.

In short, if you burn and re-rip and told iTunes to replace your existing tracks, rather than adding them as new ones, then iTunes is still using its existing database entry for that track, simply changing the file name for a .MP3 extension instead of a .M4P extension.

Now that iTunes 7.2 has added support for "iTunes Plus" non-protected tracks, there may be some unintended side-effects with the way that iTunes handles database entries.

Note that with the new iTunes Plus tracks, you won't need to burn and re-rip any more either... The files won't have DRM, but will still be in AAC format, however you can quickly and easily convert them to MP3 files with iTunes' own built-in "Convert to MP3" option on the "Advanced" menu.

[GadgetGuru72]

Originally Posted by jhollington

It's definitely a bug, and not anything that's being done deliberately.

Depending on how you burned and re-ripped, the likely result was that the iTunes database entry for that file may still have contained tags that identified the original purchased file.

In short, if you burn and re-rip and told iTunes to replace your existing tracks, rather than adding them as new ones, then iTunes is still using its existing database entry for that track, simply changing the file name for a .MP3 extension instead of a .M4P extension.

Now that iTunes 7.2 has added support for "iTunes Plus" non-protected tracks, there may be some unintended side-effects with the way that iTunes handles database entries.

Note that with the new iTunes Plus tracks, you won't need to burn and re-rip any more either... The files won't have DRM, but will still be in AAC format, however you can quickly and easily convert them to MP3 files with iTunes' own built-in "Convert to MP3" option on the "Advanced" menu.

Jesse-

Is this a theory, or have you tested it?

I've had to re-rip some purchased songs and I've ripped them to MP3. However, I always delete the purchased songs from the library first, then re-import from CD. According to what you've stated, this should mean that 7.2 won't cause any problems for me.

Since I haven't upgraded to 7.2 yet, I'm going to keep a close eye on this thread until this issue gets resolved.

[studogvetmed]

Jesse's theory makes some sense since the one user deleting and readding (thus a new library entry) fixed the issue, so perhaps there is some strange tag information left causing issues.

If that make it an authorization issue, perhaps unauthorizing and reauthorizing after the update may fix the issue too.

[Jesse Hollington]

I haven't specifically tested it only because I have nothing to test it with at the moment, having already upgraded to v7.2.

I did burn and re-rip some tracks this morning after I saw this thread, and had no issues with them whatsoever, but I can't confirm if that might not be because I'm already on v7.2. Further, tracks that I've burned and re-ripped to MP3s in the past (not sure on which version of iTunes) are having no issues either.

Logically, however, it does make sense... When you burn and re-rip a purchased track to MP3, there is no identifying information left in the resulting MP3 file itself that would indicate that it was ever a purchased track, so iTunes itself really has no way of knowing that an MP3 file that you import came from a purchased track or from a CD you bought.

Even if Apple were trying to do this deliberately (which I very seriously doubt), they'd be opening a huge can of worms by trying to track burned and imported MP3s in this manner, so much so that it would be impractical to do so even if they wanted to (which they have no reason to).

[GadgetGuru72]

Originally Posted by jhollington

Logically, however, it does make sense... When you burn and re-rip a purchased track to MP3, there is no identifying information left in the resulting MP3 file itself that would indicate that it was ever a purchased track, so iTunes itself really has no way of knowing that an MP3 file that you import came from a purchased track or from a CD you bought.

While making a statement that there is no identifying information left in the resulting MP3 is a logical statement, I'm not 100% convinced that this is true. Or, to be more specific, I suspect that there may be information in iTunes that still ties itself to the resulting MP3.

For example, one of the songs I purchased from iTunes is an "explicit lyrics" song that has the red box that states "explicit" in the "name" field on iTunes. I burned this song to a CD, deleted the purchased song from iTunes, and re-imported as an MP3. Nonetheless, the red "explicit" box still remains in the "name" field. I'm inclined to believe that this is not the result of something embedded in the MP3, but iTunes somehow knows the file is connected to the one previously purchased.

[Jesse Hollington]

Well, iTunes does keep track of any CDs you burn in it's own local version of CDDB. In fact, it does the same for any CDs you label before importing (if you re-insert the same CD later, you'll see that the edits you made the track information will show up instead of the raw information from CDDB). As far as I've ever been able to tell, however, there's nothing more than just basic tag information that gets put there, and not even parental advisory tags are included in that.

One thing I did notice, however, while testing this just now, is that if you don't eject the CD after burning it, the "Explicit" tags will still be shown, and therefore will in fact come back on import, almost as if iTunes has left that information cached in memory somehow in the track listing that is on the CD. I can't speak for what else it might be caching in this case, but it does seem unlikely that it would be caching any additional information that wasn't specifically related to the track listing itself.

If you eject the CD first, however, this advisory tag information is not retained, either in the CD track listing, or during import. This is with iTunes 7.2, so I can't authoriatively speak for previous versions at this point, but I've never previously encountered advisory tags coming back into my library after a burn and re-rip, although I've generally not done them in sequence without ejecting the CD first.

I have also confirmed, however, that the new tracks don't even come back with the same internal record ID numbers, so they're definitely new imports, even if you don't eject the CD first, and regardless of whether you delete the original tracks, or simply import the CD with the "Don't Replace" option (which creates new tracks as well).

I don't think there's any other magic tracking of the MP3 file or CD audio track going on other than just the standard information in the iTunes CD track labelling portion of the database.

I have observed problems in the past, even going back as far as iTunes v4.7 with replacing DRM tracks with non-DRM tracks using various method (from copying over the underlying files to even ripping a brand new purchased CD to replace the iTunes purchased tracks). I haven't looked at it specifically in a couple of years, but I know that back in iTunes 4.x there were some specific database tags that identified a track as "protected", and I suspect what may be happening with iTunes 7.2 is that it's seeing a flag that denotes the track as protected, but then not being able to actually find the authorization keys within the underlying file.

Personally, I haven't been able to reproduce this problem at all, and I've gone back to copies of iTunes 7.1 and even 7.0.2 that I have running on a couple of test machines), so it's definitely not something that's likely to affect everybody.

[GadgetGuru72]

Hmm, I'm not really sure whether or not I should upgrade. Your tests certainly seem to imply that this is not a universal problem. However, I have about 12,000 songs and I've done the purchase/burn/re-rip thing on about 20 of them. However, if I sync my iPod and find out that only 11,980 of them transfer because iTunes has an issue with those 20 songs, it would be insanely time consuming to figure out which 20 they are. I can remember about 5 of them, but the rest were done so long ago that I have no recollection of which ones they are.

[Germansuplex]

I was one of the first to post about having this issue, and like studogvetmed stated, his advice of removing the files from the library and then re-adding them solved the issue (though you'll have to manually add in the playcount, ratings, etc.)

I should add that this only happened with 31 tracks that had been re-ripped from purchased tracks. I've burned and re-ripped far more than that though. My guess is probably the same as jhollington's, that when you choose to replace a purchased song with a song you are ripping, iTunes somehow retains that this song is or was purchased.

Also of note is that when you use iTunes built-in encoder to recode an mp3 ripped from a purchase track, this will not solve the problem. For instance, I purchased Donny Hathaway's "Put Your Hand In The Hand", burned the AAC file to CD and re-ripped it to 128kbps mp3. This song, which had worked fine before and transfered to my iPod without incident (it should, after all, being a regular mp3 file) would no longer transfer after upgrading to 7.2. So I simply right-clicked on this song, and opted to re-convert the file to 128kbps mp3. I now had two files: the original problematic file and a new mp3 with identical properties, though I thought iTunes would recognize this as a new entry. I deleted the original 128kbps mp3. When trying to sync, I had the same problem.

I have bought tracks since the update, burned to CD, re-ripped and transferred to my iPod without incident since, so this must be a hiccup with songs ripped prior to the update.

GadgetGuru - iTunes will have a pop-up window alerting you of the number of songs that did not transfer as well as the song titles. The only thing is you'll have to write them down because there's no way to save, export or print the list. It's better than nothing though.

[GadgetGuru72]

Originally Posted by Germansuplex

GadgetGuru - iTunes will have a pop-up window alerting you of the number of songs that did not transfer as well as the song titles. The only thing is you'll have to write them down because there's no way to save, export or print the list. It's better than nothing though.

Oh, in that case there's no reason for me to hold off on upgrading. If iTunes will alert me to any songs that I need to "fix," then this shouldn't be much of a problem.

Are you using Win or Mac? I just want to confirm that this isn't a Mac-only feature.

[honeybee1236]

It's a feature on both Windows & Mac.

[GadgetGuru72]

Thanks Audrey.