iTunes 7 ate all my purchased music. Awesome.

iTunes 7 is out, and it looks great. It also shared two facts with me that I could have lived without knowing: Nelly Furtado is apparently a promiscuous girl, and not only was sexy missing, but it's been left to Justin Timberlake to bring it back. Great.

Also, the new features in iTunes 7 are really cool . . . if only they fucking worked. I connected my iPod to my laptop just now (with manual management turned on, so it doesn't automatically change my settings or music), and suddenly all of my iTunes Music Store purchases vanished. I can't even synch it to the machine I used to buy those songs, because it's in for service. It also tells me, when I try to authorize the damn machine, that I've authorized five of five machines, even though I deauthoried my old laptops when they were sent back for upgrades. Of course, I don't have access to those machines any longer, so I can't confirm that the deauthorization actually happened, or try to deauthorize them again. So. Totally. Awesome. GregN pointed me to this Apple Help document that shows how to deauthorize all your computers with one click presumably for instances exactly like this one. Thanks, GregN! So. Totally. Awesome!

I love my iPod, and I love all of my Macs, but I've grown to absolutely detest Apple's DRM, and I don't think I'll buy songs from the iTMS in the future, because even though I've given them a dump truck of money in the last year or so, I currently have nothing to show for it except frustration and several empty playlists. E-mails to Apple's iTunes Music Store customer support have never been answered in the past (they still owe me a song from an album I bought last year that didn't download,) so I currently have little recourse or opportunity to get my problems addressed. Great job, Apple! You're taking fantastic care of your customers.

Speaking of music, everyone in the world knows Soft Cell's Tainted Love and Sex Dwarf, but how come we never hear Mug's Game anymore? That's the first Soft Cell song I heard, and remains my all-time favorite.

Oh! Bonus! iTunes is trying to work its way back into my good graces and just decided to play Love Will Tear Us Apart, which brings up another point I've been meaning to make: Interpol and She Wants Revenge should just embrace it, and do some Joy Division covers. We all know what's going on anyway, guys, and it would rule. I'll buy one of your CDs when you do it, but not from the bullshit iTunes Music Store, that's for sure.

Update: Yes, I should backup all of my music, and I have (except for recent purchases) and it's entirely my fault for not making some directory-wide backup. That doesn't make the annoyance of not having access to music I paid for less annoying, because if this is a bug, it's a pretty big one that certainly should have been caught before iTunes 7 was made available to download.

Though the company was unresponsive last time I contacted them about an iTunes Music Store purchase issue, I've sent e-mail to support on this issue, too. However, I'd like to point out that I'm mostly venting here about an instance where DRM created a problem for me, and don't expect Apple to treat me any differently than they'd treat any other customer. It also looks like this made the front page at Digg. Hi Digg. I'm a Digger, too. Welcome. This is, uh, a little more attention than I wanted.

Oh, and for anyone who was wondering, I tried to reverse the polarity on my iPod, as well as modify the navigational deflector on my Powerbook, without any success. I can't find the isolinear optical chips, so I haven't been able to mess with them, yet.

Update Update: I identified this as a DRM issue because the only files that disappeared were ones that had DRM on them. After a day's worth of reflection, however, it's more accurate to identify it as a backup issue -- which has sort of been addressed by the backup your whole library feature in the new version of iTunes. I'm still not crazy about DRM, and I don't like anything that restricts what I can do with what I purchase, but that's an argument that's been run into the ground forever, so on that subject, I'll just say "Abortions for some, tiny American flags for others!"