As Engad­get reports, iTunes 7 may be more than a lit­tle flakey, and I have a night­mare story of my own.

First, some back­ground: I use a Power­Book G4 17″, with a very, very large iTunes library of 16,000 plus tracks, stored on an exter­nal 250 GB LaCie Firewire hard drive. Per­haps unwisely, I was doing sev­eral things at once shortly after down­load­ing the brand new iTunes 7: lis­ten­ing to a smart playlist on shuf­fle, and batch edit­ing tags in another smart playlist (specif­i­cally, edit­ing the Album Artist tags of all my com­pi­la­tions to read “Var­i­ous Artists” — see The Dork Report for Sep­tem­ber 13 for more infor­ma­tion). To com­pli­cate mat­ters, I was run­ning Last.fm in back­ground (itself freshly updated to Ver­sion 1.0.6).

After batch edit­ing tags for sev­eral min­utes, I open­ing the batch info win­dow for another dozen or so. iTunes sud­denly stopped play­ing a few sec­onds into Pink Floyd’s “Time” from The Dark Side of the Moon, and then froze. I noticed Last.fm had frozen as well. I waited until it seemed nei­ther would free up on their own, then I force quit both. I relaunched iTunes, but it was not­i­ca­bly slug­gish (many spin­ning psy­che­delic piz­zas of death for me). I selected a song to get info, and noth­ing hap­pened. I tried another and a tiny excla­ma­tion mark appeared next to it (which I know from expe­ri­ence to mean that a track has been man­u­ally deleted or moved on your hard drive and iTunes can no longer locate it). I ner­vously switched to the Finder and clicked on the music folder on my exter­nal drive. To my hor­ror, the folder was empty, and the cus­tom icon I had applied long ago had disappeared!

Need­less to say, I feared the worst: sev­eral giga­bytes and years worth of music col­lect­ing (not to men­tion irre­place­able tracks pur­chased on the iTunes Store) gone. Not know­ing what else to do, in fact think­ing doing any­thing else might make mat­ters worse, I quit iTunes and restarted my Power­book. The exter­nal drive took longer to mount than usual (I’ve read that Mac OS X checks disks for errors on startup, so per­haps it sensed a prob­lem and was run­ning a repair). Once every­thing had started up and set­tled, I used Disk Util­ity to ver­ify both my inter­nal and exter­nal dri­ves, with no errors reported. Tak­ing the prover­bial deep breath, I opened up my exter­nal Firewire drive… and the folder was back to nor­mal. I launched iTunes, and again, every­thing was nor­mal. As if noth­ing had hap­pened. Thank god, right? But ter­ri­fy­ing that sev­eral giga­bytes of files could dis­ap­pear and reap­pear so easily.

Shaken, I ran Backup to bring my Home folder back­ups up to date, and promptly went to bed to try and calm myself down with a nap.

There are a bevy of other prob­lems being reported on Mac­in­touch, includ­ing the very odd case of large chunks of people’s libraries being flagged as “Explicit.” But I think my story wins.

So. Lessons learned:

1. For cry­ing out loud, buy SuperDuper already! I’ve never prop­erly backed up my music col­lec­tion for the sim­ple rea­son that I don’t have another drive big enough to dupli­cate it. Time, I think, to start delet­ing crap I never lis­ten to nor wish to keep, and bring it down to a size more eas­ily backed up.
2. Resist the temp­ta­tion to down­load new soft­ware as soon as it comes out. At the very least, don’t stress-test it with pre­cious, irre­place­able com­puter data.

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