I’ve lost some confidence in iTunes’s ability at managing music as it appears to be deleting some of it. No doubt it’s got something to do with DRM so I’ve decided to convert everything to mp3 and triple back that up.

I bet Apple have told the music business all kinds of stuff to put their corporate minds at ease. ‘Don’t worry with iTunes we can manage everyone’s music, including getting rid of everything we aren’t sure should be on iTunes’. It is a bit worrying, how do I know what the iTunes and Apple’s services are doing? iTunes may not be running but there is the Apple Mobile Device service and also the iPod service which are both started automatically when the PC is started. How much information is being sent back to Apple about the music I have and also what Apple thinks I ought to have. Or, is it just a too many files problem? I have in excess of 37,000 songs, podcasts and lord know what else in iTunes and maybe that’s just too much.

Also whilst I’m pointing a finger at dastardly companies accumulating data about me, how do I know what data Windows is sending back to Microsoft to be stored on some buggy database somewhere ready to be unleashed and pointed somewhere where I don’t want it sent at some point in the future?

I’m completely stuck at level 56 in WoW, can’t find any quests I can finish. Do I have to grind away till I get to 58 and can go to Outland or do I just stop?

iTunes is playing havoc with some of my ripped music, it appears to be deleting it.

All of the older music on iTunes seems to be OK but a lot of the music I have ripped in the last year keeps getting deleted. I have everything backed up in triplicate but it’s still a pain when you realise somethings missing. I have a feeling it may be one of the the iTunes settings I have applied and it’s given iTunes carte blanche to do what it pleases.

I have noticed that it appears to be AAC audio file, rather than MPEG audio file, tracks that are getting deleted, so have set the ‘Import Using’ encoder to mp3. Hopefully newly imported tracks will be safe. When they are newly imported they then do have an extension of .mp3 as opposed to the AAC encoded files which have an extension of .m4a, which is an MPEG-4 format. AAC is also known as MPEG-2 Part 7. This barely makes sense.

The few music tracks that I have bought from iTunes, and that are subject to DRM and have an extension of .mp4, I now can’t play on the XP PC as it has been restored back to an initially purchased state and the PC is now non-authorised. Oh yeah, well who made it non-authorised and what else can they do behind my back? OK iTunes you just forced me to replace legally paid for music by downloaded versions from a usenet newsgroup. Don’t blame me.

What other file extensions can iTunes use? Podcasts can also use .m4a file extension as well as .m4b. The difference between those two is that m4a files cannot bookmark whereas m4b files can. And if you want the bookmark functionality on a podcast stored with an extension of m4a you just change the extension to .m4b by renaming the file.

The iPhones ringtones uses files with a .m4r extension and raw MPEG-4 video files have an extension of .m4v, which apparently are nearly identical to Apples Quicktime .mov files.

Well that’s cleared that up then. I think I need to read up on exactly what iTunes is really up to.