12-18-2011, 06:44 PM

I all honesty, I'm pretty upset. I'll try to remain calm as I'm writing this, but bear with me.

So I have recently reset my iPhone because it was being slow and I just wanted to reset it from scratch. And to my horror I quickly find out that all the music I've bought in the iTunes app CANNOT be redownloaded. I try going to one of the albums I bought and click Buy. It tells me I've already bought it and if I want to buy it again....

WHAT?! Buy it again?! Are you kidding me? So I've bought like 4-5 albums on the iTunes store app, and I can't even get them back, because I chose to reset my iPhone using iTunes on my computer ON MY OWN ACCOUNT. So there's obviously nothing to do but to buy the albums once again. And I buy one of the albums that I desperately need. And all is "fine" until I decide I want to add more music to my iPhone.

So I plug it into my computer, and no I do not own a Mac, open up iTunes and in my naiveness I think I'm able to add a few .mp3 files to my iPhone music collection through iTunes. BUT NO. I can't add ANY music now. It says it has to completely overwrite my previous music library on my iPhone, because it apparently is synchronized with another iTunes library.

AGAIN, WHAT?! Another library? Are you saying that buying music from the iTunes app counts as synchronizing with another library?! ON THE SAME APPLE ACCOUNT?! So every time I want to synchronize my iTunes library from my computer with my iPhone I have to buy all the friggen albums once again from the iTunes app. Does that sound fair?! And I read a lot of forum posts around the internet going "oh well, you can just download your music again using the "purchased" tab in iTunes". To that I can reply: Guess what, that doesn't work in my country. +1 for localization. There is no such thing as a "purchased" tab in my iTunes app. And I checked my credit card balance, and after I purchased one of my albums for the second time, they DID charge me the extra money.

So there you have it. So glad Steve Jobs was alive to empty my wallet, because I'm actually doing the right thing and buy the music...

12-18-2011, 07:03 PM

What iPhone do you have? What version of IOS is on it?

I have re-downloaded my songs on many of my computers and iPod/iPhones and paid nothing. As long as I logged in with my iTunes store account, I was able to download everything missing over again and on all my registered apple products.

12-20-2011, 02:56 AM

Maybe you should look into something like a backup strategy for your digital purchases? Just sayin' ...

12-22-2011, 07:06 AM

Originally Posted by dtravis7

What iPhone do you have? What version of IOS is on it?

I have re-downloaded my songs on many of my computers and iPod/iPhones and paid nothing. As long as I logged in with my iTunes store account, I was able to download everything missing over again and on all my registered apple products.

This. I do it all the time. Everything, past a certain point, is always there available to download if it sees it is not on the device I am on. Some purchases made years and years ago are not, but I figure they were prior to whatever is in place now. Yet, even bcd THEN, when it was widely asserted that Apple would NOT allow re-downloads, in a couple of instances I simply called them and they authorized re-downloads. I dunno why you're having problems. Sorry.

12-22-2011, 08:39 AM

none of any of this matters...

you can, once, call Apple and have them restore all purchases, making them available for download once again. Again, you can do it ONCE. I went through it when my music drive (external) failed and I lost my entire library, they allowed me to redownload all my purchased music and audiobooks that I was unable to restore.