The Zeitgeist

There was a “one more thing” that Steve Jobs didn’t announce today, which he should have: a iTunes Music Server (notice I didn’t say an AppleTV server… they already made one of them :). I am one of those crazy people who, like most media lovers, has ungodly amounts of Music, podcasts, etc. stored in iTunes. In my case almost 1TB (yes, one terabyte). [And, yes, it's all legal, thanks for asking...]

I have ripped the 2500+ CDs I own, plus I have probably purchased over 100 albums/songs/etc/on the iTunes store. I also use iTunes to manage the dozens of shows which I enjoy that are pod-casted from around the world. It’s all lots of fun, to mangle an expression, until someone (iTunes) loses an eye (or, in this case, a pointer to a file on disk).

iTunes uses a binary database on disk to keep track of where your media files actually are. In my case, they’re on a big server in my basement so that the 4 other Macs in the house can use both the music I already own (from my CDs), the stuff I have purchased from the iTunes store, as well as all the pod casts I archive. Occasionally, and for no apparent reason, the iTunes DB on my disk will get corrupted and suddenly iTunes cannot find a track, or will randomly replace a track in a playlist with some other totally unrelated track. Once this happens the only way to fix things is either to go song by song through my entire iTunes library and “correct” it. This is an unspeakably painful and horrible process because the name “looks” right and is only replaced with the bogus track when you double click on on it. So you have to remember what it was supposed to be, then correct the playlist. At the end of the day it’s more direct to just wipe out the iTunes DB file and re-import all your music… of course you lose your play-counts, ratings, etc. Not a lot of fun.

I’ve filed this as a bug with Apple several times… each time it’s dropped out of the bug reporting system as a “WON’T FIX” issue. I am sure that I am not the only one seeing this problem.. and it’s only going to get worse over time as Apple adds more and more functionality and people jam more and more into their iTunes libraries…

So, Apple, what do you say? Can we get a fix for this..? An embedded SQL DB instead of a BerkeleyDB file will fix this pretty quickly..

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