Sometimes, Apple's iPod bloom is off the rose

Reading over this blog post yesterday, I was surprised to read of such an abysmal situation with an Apple iPod, iTunes version 7 (the newest version just released Tuesday) and, gasp, a disappearing and expensive iTunes music collection. Wil Wheaton, one of this network's bloggers from Card Squad and TV Squad, downloaded the newest iTunes software and started running into what appears to be immediate problems.

Wil says that he'd enabled manual music management (as opposed to the iTunes automatic music management that Apple trumpets quite often). When he did that, though, all his iTunes-purchased music went away. And away. Nowhere could his music be found on his computer, his iPod, or floating in the air somewhere. It seemed completely gone.

Now, normally this is not expected from Apple products which, at least in perception, work beautifully, wonderfully and without worry to the millions of users who devote the back of their heads to Apple product. But Wil's case is rather harsh -- many an Apple customer would be quite distressed to find that the great sum of money paid to the iTunes music store had simply vanished if their music collections became part of thin air due to some kind of unique and odd misconfiguration -- not due to the customer.

Has this happened to other iTunes and iPod users? For those with a fairly complex iPod environment with multiple "authorized" PCs and whatnot, has this happened to you? What did Apple do about it, if anything? To Apple's credit, and my hats off to the power of blogs, an Apple customer service agent called Wil and re-authorized his entire music collection so he could re-download all prior-purchased music.

So, in the end, the issue was resolved, but only after Apple was alerted to Wil's blog post detailing the rather exquisite situation and how it unfolded. This could have happened to anyone, though, and with Apple's tight control on DRM (Digital Rights Management), which works wonders for the *masses* so that downloaded music can't be shared all over the planet instantly, in this case it was a huge cause of massive frustration from a good paying customer. This is not the kind of customer Apple needs to let down, yes?