iTunes help

You're not going to like the answer. If you don't have a backup, you have to buy it all again. You can't redownload purchased music and videos.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1469

This is why I still mostly buy CDs. I can always re-rip.

With Apple's purchase of Lala (and its subsequent shutdown) I have to think we're at most 12-18 months away from some sort of cloud interface for iTunes, which, in theory, should let you sync your purchases to any device that uses your iTunes account info as a login.

In theory.

Anyway, you could wait and see if something like that comes to fruition before you drop another $60 re-buying. But, again, I recommend physical media or a download service with a more lenient TOS agreement.

Edited because I read further, and you can copy the music. I doubt most people do this though.

See, that's the way I think it should work. I have gone to the option within iTunes that says "Search for already made purchases online" (or something like that) and found a song I had bought like a year or so earlier.

My HDD on my PC just died, but luckily it was only the boot portion of the drive, so I was able to pull off my music that I had bought/ripped. And a lot of it that I bought was still on my iTouch, so I used the ol' "Transfer purchases from device to computer" option to get that stuff back on the new PC.

Actually I discovered last year that if you email apple with your problem and promise to back everything up (seriously. thats what I said in my email) they let you re download the songs you lost. If you bought any while they were on sale, you may have lost those for good though. Thats what happened to me. I was able to download most of my library again with the exception of 2 or 3 albums.

I also have an itunes question, which is why I looked for this thread to begin with. When I buy compliations, my default settings split up the album by artist instead of having just the entire album under one. Has anyone found a way to change this?

Click the Album tab at the top of that column and it changes the sorting to alphabetical albums - either descending or ascending. Same for Genre, Artist, Song Name, etc. Only problem with this is that there's only a Primary Sort, no secondary or tertiary.

You can also just create a Playlist that includes only the tracks from that album, in their intended order.

I forget if it's due to a default setting that I had to change, but my copy of iTunes includes a "Compilations" listing under "All" and before the album titles in my Album menu. All compilations are grouped under this if the tracks are tagged correctly (the tracks also appear singly under artist names, but if you want to view them as part of a single album, you can look them up under Compilations). This is assuming you're using the standard "list" view (Library to the left, Genres, Artists, and Albums menu at the top, tracks on the bottom).

To check this, right click on a song, select Song Info, and go to the Info tab. "Part of a Compilation" should be checked (you can also select multiple songs at once and do the same thing, but the "Part of a Compilation" info is on the Options tab instead).

If you've been downloading compilations and they're incorrectly coded as not compilations, that has nothing to do with your personal iTunes settings and everything to do with shitty metadata encoding from the source from which you're downloading. You can manually change this, of course, which is handy, because a lot of sites are really terrible at assigning compilation status (assigning greatest hits albums by a single artist as compilations, etc.).

There's some more information here, although the screen grabs are of an older version of iTunes.

ETA: You can change an enormous amount of data on individual tracks and albums using "Song Info" - correct poorly assigned genres, assign groupings, correct typos, change shorting orders. I'm surprised more people don't take advantage of this.

Resurrecting this thread.

Has anyone ever seen this message before:"Unable to check for available downloads. The network connection timed out"

I upgraded some songs to iTunes Plus last night but can't download them. I had just finished downloading infinity blade from the app store and then all of a sudden I get this.
Nothing I've found online has worked yet, and iTunes support hasn't been exactly helpful.