Filed under: iTunes
Is the iTunes Music Store scratching and skipping?
Over the past couple of days, we've received reports here at the TUAW home office (located in the seaside town of Ocean City, MD; excellent taffy) of multiple download problems in purchasing music at the iTunes store. While the transaction completes as far as billing is concerned, the actual file downloads... don't. Users are getting connection errors and the file never seems to arrive. In addition to the reader reports, a couple of us have seen the problem firsthand.There are several threads on Apple's discussion boards covering the issue, and most seem to converge on the suggestion that a large download queue may be behind the problem, or a single corrupt song that blocks further downloads. If doing a manual check for purchased and undownloaded music doesn't solve the problem, Apple's download support page for iTunes recommends submitting a problem ticket within your iTunes purchase history; this should allow the customer service agent to clean your queue and improve your download experience. For worldwide customers, the main directory for iTunes support is here.
For what it's worth, late Wednesday night I bought an album that downloaded cleanly and quickly, but obviously people's mileage is varying. With the level of attention brought to the iTunes store by the NBC withdrawal and the iPod product announcements, this is not the time for Apple's technical execution to falter; the iTunes Store didn't get to be the #3 music retailer in the USA by stalling customers in the checkout lines. We'll keep an eye on the trouble reports and see how things progress.
P.S. One year ago, the iTunes store was down for a good reason...
Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Jeff said 12:22PM on 9-13-2007
Ocean Beach, MD? I live in Maryland and I've never heard of Ocean Beach. The only "seaside town" in Maryland is Ocean City. Just wondering where Ocean Beach, MD is...
Anyway, I haven't experienced any problems as of late with the itunes store.
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Chip said 12:20PM on 9-13-2007
Don't you mean Ocean City, MD?
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Raf said 12:23PM on 9-13-2007
Unfortunately, it's doing that manual check that is at the heart of what's going wrong.
Seems that whenever one selects "Check for Purchases" from the "Store" menu; one receives an error message that states "Unable to check for purchases. The iTunes store is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." I have had this error message & have had undelivered media that has been paid for and charged to my credit card for going on 3 days now.
For myself, it's not the fact that I have a download problem that's making me mad. It's that there is no public acknowledgement by Apple that they are working on this problem, or that they haven't even publicly acknowledged that the problem exists.
And as for the argument that I have a large download queue? 5 songs & 1 TV episode. I've had much larger queues come through no problem in previous instances.
And it's not just the US Store. On the Apple Support Discussion, people are writing in from the UK, Canada, Spain, Germany, France, Austria, & Finland describing the very same problem & error message.
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Paul said 12:39PM on 9-13-2007
I've been having a problem with one of my SciFi channel subscriptions, where it appears the wrong series' episode was posted. I have therefore downloaded an episode, but not from the series I purchased. I've sent that silly "report a problem" tag three times now, and all that's happened is that the episode in question has been pulled.
iTunes really needs to have some kind of customer support options other than "hey! there's a problem!"
Ugh. Every day, the Apple loses a little shine for me. I think they may be getting too big for their britches, and some growing pains are ahead. Let's hope they get things worked out.
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kory said 12:39PM on 9-13-2007
Could it possibly have something to do with the launch of the Wifi Store?
Oh, and I can't get crap any songs that I bought from iTunes SPECIFICALLY to try out the ringtone editor to even work. I get an error everytime that says "Could not create ringtone. An unknown error has occured (-42160) There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later."
Anybody else seeing that one?
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Me said 12:47PM on 9-13-2007
Could this mean BBC TV is coming to iTunes? UK event, iTunes messing up like last year before wide distribution of movies/videos...
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Anton Wilson said 1:06PM on 9-13-2007
3 days now with a 2 song queue [Tuesday's freebie + 1]. It wouldn't surprise me if this is an iTunes app bug that will require an update.
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William Beem said 1:25PM on 9-13-2007
I've been banging away at this since Tuesday, and still no relief. Apple did respond and acknowledge that they had a problem and it would be cleared up in four hours. That was last night at 9:15 EDT. It's still not working.
They also suggested that part of the problem could be a slow connection, but that's not an issue on my end. Everything else works and surfs just fine, and they had no problems with the part that charges me for the songs.
I also noticed that they cleaned out my download queue one time and replaced it. During one of my attempts to Check for Purchases, it told me I had nothing to download. Later, I was back to 63 items to download.
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Jack said 1:52PM on 9-13-2007
Since about two weeks ago I had problems with buffering the preview of a song. I have a fast connection and this was never an issue, now listening to previews I get the buffering alert at least twice for every song. I had a few friends report the same issue, has anybody else experienced this outside of Boston?
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Adam said 2:16PM on 9-13-2007
I've had trouble downloading about 8 random tunes... It billed, but I get a "the store is down" kind of error message when I try to download. Tuesday night. I sent Apple an e-mail, but I don't think they're replying in their stated 24 hour timeframe.
Boo. I want mah tunes.
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Peter Payne said 2:31PM on 9-13-2007
God, you guys are in Ocean City? I am so "natsukashii" (a Japanese word which officially means 'what you are saying makes me so nostalgic that I look like one of those manga characters with a tear rolling out of my eye). I have many font memories of sitting in hours of traffic waiting to go there. How cool.
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Evan Owen said 2:33PM on 9-13-2007
Raf,
I'm having exactly the same problem and can't get Apple to admit anything to me either. How long will this take to get resolved? Who knows...
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Liz said 2:37PM on 9-13-2007
Same problem here. I finally got a response from Apple last night, telling me the problem would be resolved in 4 hours. The next morning its still not working. I emailed them back to tell them I waited over 12 hours and its still not working... no response back yet...
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MacMasterSkully said 2:40PM on 9-13-2007
Same with me: 3 days with a 4 item cue (3 songs, 1 tv show). I am sure they will make it better soon (I hope!)
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chris said 4:01PM on 9-13-2007
Here is the reply I got from Apple:
I have reset your password and I recreated the error. Although, I was expecting this to happen as we have had an issue with a handful of customers being unable to download today.
Apple is currently working toward a resolution, and you will receive an email after the matter has been investigated and further information is available.
It appears that this is a template they have set up as I have received the same basic email a couple of times. I think this has to do with the upgrade to 7.4.1 where they pop up a new EULA for ringtones. As soon as I accepted it, my music disappeared from the shopping cart though they were happy to take my money, I still can't download music I paid for on Monday.
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minimalist said 5:18PM on 9-13-2007
Same thing here with a 13 song queue. It's going on 36 hours and there has been no response from Apple yet. However, podcasts have been downloading just fine for the last 36 hours.
And its not a connection or OS problem either. I have tried downloading these songs from my XP machine at work, my Macbook at home and my iMac G5 and I keep getting the same "Temporarily Unavailable" message about the iTunes store.
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ACLetras said 4:05PM on 9-13-2007
Really, Ocean Town? "Wer go'n down Ocean Town, hon" just doesn't sound like it fits.
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Skuli said 5:18PM on 9-13-2007
Hi,
I bought two episodes of Mad Men and one album the other night and while I have been billed for them, every time I go to download them I get an error saying the iTunes Store is down. I have submitted a ticket but haven't heard anything back from Apple.
It seems to be a store problem, because it doesn't matter what computer I use to log into my account, the same problem occurs.
-Skuli
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G said 4:54PM on 9-13-2007
I was just able to buy one song, though it took an extra few seconds to start the download. Links from an alert email do not work, however. The phobos machine at Apple is throwing up 500 errors or refusing connections altogether.
I've also noticed that iTunes 7.4.1 is tossing out my column selection and width preferences for store pages. Wasn't this a bug from a couple of versions previous?
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DaveZ said 5:38PM on 9-13-2007
I had 6 songs and they got blocked with this error. Checking doesn't work either. I tried the free download and it came through without a hitch. But the 6 previous are still queued.
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