Express Lane Support<\/a> page. I had to dig around a bit more before I found “Quality of purchased content” under “Purchases, Billing & Redemption.” I filled in the information required and opened a case describing the issue. An automated message stating my support request would be responded to within 24 hours came back very quickly.<\/p>\nInitial Response<\/h2>\n
The “real live person” response came back within 4 hours of posting the complaint. Impressive, since I posted my complaint at about 12:20 AM. The responding service representative apologized and gave detailed instructions on how to delete and re-download the content. I as pretty sure this would not resolve the issue (it wasn’t a corrupt download, as they seemed to think), but I went through the motions anyway. Upon listening to the re-downloaded content, I confirmed that the issue was not resolved and replied to the service representative, advising them that I believed the source files on their servers were not correct.<\/p>\n
The Final Response<\/h2>\n
Hello Kenneth,<\/em><\/p>\nX here again from the iTunes Store Support. I am very sorry about my delay in responding to you. I have been away from the office for the last 2 days. I understand the album is still incorrect. When it comes to your money, I can certainly appreciate how important it is to feel that you are treated fairly, and I would be more than happy to help you out with this today.<\/em><\/p>\nI’m sorry to learn that this item did not meet the standard of quality you have come to expect from the iTunes Store. I have submitted this item for investigation. Apple takes the quality of the items offered on the iTunes Store seriously and will investigate the issue with this item, but I can’t say when or if the issue will be resolved.<\/em><\/p>\nIn five to seven business days, a credit of $9.99 should be posted to your card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.<\/em><\/p>\nKenneth, I want to thank you for choosing the iTunes Store and for being such a big part of the iTunes family.<\/em><\/p>\nThank you for contacting iTunes Store Customer Support. Have a great day.<\/em><\/p>\nFix It Yourself<\/h2>\n
Given that response, I had no choice but to spend some time in Audacity repairing the tracks. The general procedure was as follows:<\/p>\n
\n- Open the first track in Audacity. This imports it to a native format used by Audacity for manipulation.<\/li>\n
- Jump to the end and copy the bit at the end which belongs to the following track.<\/li>\n
- Open the second track in Audacity and paste the first two seconds into their rightful place<\/li>\n
- Zoom in on the pasted part and remove the slight pause introduced by the copy\/paste operation. I progressively zoomed in and removed large blank spaces until I was zoomed as far as I could, then I matched up the two ends, deleting the last bit of silence.<\/li>\n
- Listen to the second track to make sure it was a seamless paste (and the right song).<\/li>\n
- Go back to the first track and delete the tail end. Export that track to .mp3 and .m4a (AAC) formats. Close that track.<\/li>\n
- The open second track becomes your “first track”, and the “second track” becomes the following track. Start again at step 2 above.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
After all the tracks were repaired (I worked on a copy from out of iTunes), I deleted the originals from iTunes and re-imported the repaired versions. I then had to go through and repair the tagging, as it was a bit messed up. For some reason, the tagging didn’t import consistently from the Apple versions (either that or it was inconsistent to begin with).<\/p>\n
I wonder how many free copies of this album they’ll give out before they correct the files on their server? I wonder how many people will complain and get a refund vs. the number who will just put up with the issue? I wonder how many other albums are messed up on this way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Setup I recently purchased three albums from iTunes. After downloading them, syncing them to my iPod, and listening through them I was happy. While driving the next day, I thought I’d shuffle through the playlist I had created with the new tracks. I quickly discovered that all the tracks on one of the albums […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[31,106,194,195],"class_list":["post-897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-audacity","tag-itunes","tag-technical-support","tag-technology-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kristau.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}