I had a rare Apple customer service moment this past week that left me both thankful and frustrated. The short of the story is as follows: I went to buy a track in iTunes from the Hendrix blues album and iTunes informed me I had already purchased this track... upon some reflection I realized I had bought it a few years ago on a desktop box in a place I worked. I had long since forgotten this and apparently 142 other songs I had purchased over the years and various computers. So I went into my iTunes account and then realized though I did buy these items I could no longer download them. Now if this was a CD from say CDBaby.com and I had lost it well I would expect to have to buy it again, the logic being I bought the CD that I could play anywhere and lost it somewhere, but with iTunes I bought this DRM laden digital item that is pretty much somehow not mine. So this set me to thinking... shouldn't iTunes make this available for me to download since it is really theirs and they are just letting me listen to it in my own limited and closely guarded way off in a room somewhere that no one else can hear?
Turns out they will but only as a "courtesy" and only once! Ha! So this left me thankful I could recover those tracks and frustrated at the realization they were never really mine to begin with but are now mine to lose... ahhh DRM... makes the work a warm and fuzzy place.
So incase you are wondering how to do this for yourself:
