Download the new for apple AutoMounter download#

I can provide a ktrace output file of iTunes doing this, if necessary. Once iTunes has finished starting up, that file and folder will have been removed. I can easily reproduce this behavior by quitting iTunes, creating a new folder under Downloads and copying an audio file into it, then launching iTunes. It appears that if you have a folder named “Downloads” in your iTunes Music folder, iTunes will scan it on startup and attempt to delete any folders it finds there which contain audio files. New behavior in iTunes 7 has deleted all my purchased music, along with a fair number of other legally-downloaded songs. My email to iTunes customer support just now: Author Josh Posted on 3 Categories Uncategorized Tags annoyances, bug, itunes, ktrace, Technology

I consider this a bug, and I’ll be writing this up and sending it to Apple in the morning. Long story short, if you manage your own iTunes Music directory, don’t create a top-level folder named “Downloads”. rwxrw-r- 1 itunes communists 3097604 23:18 Which MC Was That.mp3 rw-rw-r- 1 itunes communists 817 21:13 whatsit.log rw-rw-r- 1 itunes communists 1481 21:13 eliki.log rwxrw-r- 1 itunes communists 3097604 22:33 Which MC Was That.mp3

(ls -lR on the server showing the Frontalot directory being removedĭrwxrwsr-x 2 itunes communists 4096 23:18 Frontalot Here are the (snipped for relevance) results: To verify that this is what was going on, I ran iTunes under ktrace, while watching the contents of the Downloads directory in another window. Unfortunately, I had saved all my iTMS purchases to Downloads/iTMS/. So Downloads/Frontalot/Start_Over.mp3 got deleted, but Downloads/Frontalot/Nerdcore_Rising/This_Old_Man.mp3 and Downloads/Frontalot-Which_MC_Was_That.mp3 were spared. When we upgraded Cam’s copy of iTunes to version 7, it saw the “Downloads” directory and removed every song that was exactly one directory deep from there. Cam’s was correctly set to the top level. My own iTunes configuration was set incorrectly–my Music folder was set to a subfolder of the shared directory, not the top level. That worked just fine until the latest update. And a sensible name for a directory to save downloaded files in is “Downloads”.

Download the new for apple AutoMounter download#

Since the shared folder is automounted on our Macs, it makes sense that if we download tunes, we’d save them to the server instead of our own local storage. Leaving both those options off means that we don’t have to worry about the other person’s copy of iTunes moving files around and our own library getting out of sync. When we buy a new CD, we rip it straight on the file server, and then add it to our respective iTunes libraries. Our setup, however, requires that we keep both of those options turned off.Ĭam and I share an iTunes Music folder by means of a linux server with a lot of disk running Samba. If you have either of the “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” or “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” options set, this will probably never be a problem for you. Here’s the deal: if you have a directory named “Downloads” in your iTunes Music folder (the folder specified in the General section of the Advanced preferences), iTunes will now helpfully keep it clean of “temporary” files for you.

I hadn’t been bitten by it earlier because I had slightly misconfigured my own instance of iTunes, but when we upgraded Cam’s instance, her correct configuration triggered the behavior. A bunch of technical jargon is after the cut, but the short version is that it’s the result of new behavior in iTunes 7, and possibly even specifically 7.0.2.

The answer is so incredibly stupid, I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t have the ktrace/kdump output to confirm it. I figured out why iTunes lost a bunch of my tunes a couple of weeks ago.