Tag Archives: iTunes

Don’t buy my music on iTunes! (Yet)

I’m on iTunes…I was delighted — no, overjoyed — when I checked the iTunes Store today and discovered that my EP is available. But my enthusiasm was quickly tempered when I noticed that, curiously, all 3 songs appeared to have a running time of 45 seconds.

Curious, considering that the tracks are 4:36, 1:38 and 2:36, respectively.

…at least partially.

I decided to spend the $2.97 to see what a customer would actually receive, and sure enough, each track cut off right at the 45-second mark. So I contacted TuneCore tech support, with a fairly mild (for me) email explaining the situation and requesting assistance. I received a response a few hours later informing me that the files they had on their server were corrupted. I will be emailing this rep new versions of the files shortly, and hopefully within a few days the correct full versions of the songs will be available. Maybe I should try the same approach to get them to replace Magma’s truncated K.A. 3!

Busted by iTunes!

Now here’s something interesting. Apparently a (now deceased) pianist released a series of CDs under her own name that were actually identical to other previously released CDs by other artists!

I’ve had it happen a few times that I would put a rather obscure CD into my computer and CDDB would incorrectly identify it as something else. This is because their key to identifying a CD is the number and length of all of the tracks, which generally is unique, but of course it’s not impossible for two CDs to have the same number of tracks, and for their respective lengths all to match. Out of the 700 or so CDs in my collection, I’d say 10 to 15 of them had this happen when I ripped them in iTunes.

Usually the false matches are so obviously wrong that there’s little room for confusion, but in this case things were different!