iTunes 11 Is Even Worse Than I Thought

I'm having an annoying problem with iTunes, and my attempts to connect with Apple about this have been less than useless -- I just sent an email to their official support address and got a message back that mailbox is "not monitored."

(Really? You don't even look at the requests to support your expensive products? That's remarkably dumb for a company making multi-billions of dollars a year.)

So here's what I wrote to them, in hopes either some Apple social media drone will see it or one of you folks will have an idea:

1: I went to your site to report a problem in iTunes: I recently upgraded to iTunes 11.1.3 (and, subsequently, to OS 10.9.1, but this problem seems to have begun with the iTunes upgrade).

Now, sometimes when I’m playing music, some of the “comments” field on a track will disappear within 2-3 seconds after that track starts playing.

Since most of my playlists are driven by comments, this is a huge problem for me.

As far as I can tell, the comments are deleted right as the track begins to play — and then, usually, the track drops out of that playlist and so stops playing. (The track is still in my library, though.)

This does not happen all of the time, and I’ve never seen it delete all comments — but it does delete the last phrase or word regularly, and sometimes more than that. I have not been able to determine what triggers the deletion, but if I go back into the comments field and re-add the missing comments, they seem to stay at that point.

(Or, at least, those new comments aren’t instantly deleted with the next play. I have no idea what’s triggering the deletions.)


2: And the second problem has to do with reporting.

I wanted to search Apple Support Communities to see if others had experienced this problem.

But, when I went to log in with my Apple ID, it directed me to this page: https://appleid.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyAppleId.woa/157/wo/wIQeioRlXPjtX5BCZMeyXg/0.0.69.17.5.

I was asked to pick a username, and then — when I did — I got an error that said "An account utilizing this email address already exists. Only one account per email address is allowed on Apple Support Communities.”

But it gave no way to log into that existing account — even though I was ostensibly already logged into it.

I couldn’t get to any Support Communities page, because I couldn’t create a new username (since one already existed) and the site wouldn’t let me use that old username (whatever it is).

That’s a huge catch-22: can’t create a new account and can’t use the old one.


Please let me know what steps I can take to correct these problems — or what steps Apple is taking to fix them directly.

The ironic thing is that I was thinking about posting about how much easier it's been to play games on this Mac under Mac OS vs. Windows -- no drivers or other bumf, just push the button on a PS3 controller and it works -- when Apple decides to fuck up something that's much closer to their USP.

So I don't think I'll be writing any "Apple stuff is really KEWL" posts until they figure out this thing and fix it.

I've given up on getting multiple windows in iTunes 11, though just having that would have made dealing with this problem massively easier. I wonder if Apple knows just how difficult they're making things for people who have been supporting and promoting them for years (two decades, in may case) to keep doing so?