I personally, I couldn’t care less for having a phone with a bunch of whiz-bang features like a web browser and a bunch of pointless applications (See: I Am Rich) for download, so events like these don’t mean much to me. But they also give Apple’s events all around less significance. What’s exciting is the imminence of new Apple computer products, or expansion into new technological sectors.

What I think I’m trying to say is that the iPod is old and quite frankly boring. It’s really difficult to get excited over the fifteenth re-hash of the same basic product idea. It’s easy to get excited about a new Apple computer, like the MacBook Air (despite it being a bit of a disappointment) since Apple only really sells six different computers.

permissions differ on “private/var/log/secure.log”, should be -rw——- , they are -rw-r—– .
Permissions differ on “System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.usbmuxd.plist”, should be -rw-r–r– , they are -rwxr-xr-x .
Group differs on “private/etc/cups”, should be 0, group is 26.

Anyway, when I took this beast to the Genius Bar initially, I was told all my troubles that I was having had to do with the fact that I had about 4GB of free space, which would be fine except for the fact that I am running File Vault. I was urged to get an external drive, clear out the clutter and turn off the program. Not so simple, but I’ll not get into that. The reason I mention this, is that I suspect this is the same kind of issue. It’s much lesser version of the same weirdness I had before my adventures in external hard drives and computer illiteracy… So, checking through everything, my actual mp3’s are all fine, it’s just the communication between iTunes and my hard drive that is getting muddled (small miracles)… And it was just playing with the “Genius” option to see if iTunes could really make cohesive playlists. Before crashing, I learned that it isn’t that amazing but still better than random. Oh yes, and upgrading QuickTime (but that might have just been a coincidence).

Backups are good and I do one every week or so… There is very little that gets added on in between time that is so valuable to me… Now, if I had as massive an mp3, video and photo collection as you, it might be a different story! Also, I am happy to see that you are still alive and thanks for your input! I hope all is well in your wasteland!

In a slightly related theme, a song that reminded me of you just popped up on iTunes. I guess that, not only is iTunes 8 very snappy, it has done some kind of freaky mind meld and is capable of generating playlists accordingly!

For what it’s worth, I also have my iTunes library on an external drive, with approximately 15,000 music tracks, and around 300 or so video files. More precisely, the media files are on an external drive on a server in my closet, and my main workstation mounts that drive over the network (so it’s sort of external, once removed I guess). However, my iTunes library files are on the workstation’s hard drive, and that’s what stores all the pointers to the actual media files. I’m going to guess that when iTunes crashed on you, the library files are what got messed up. And yeah – it’d be a royal pain to figure out what’s missing (along with losing various meta data about the media such as number of times played, ratings, etc.)

Unless you have the library files backed up, there’s not much you can do about recovering it short of manually fixing up the problems. That said, it really shouldn’t have happened in the first place – in fact, I can’t remember the last time iTunes crashed on me. Maybe your disk drive needs some structural repair? Try running ‘Disk Utility’ in the ‘Applications->Utilities’ folder. Select ‘Verify Disk’ on your internal hard drive, then run ‘Repair Permissions’ and see if that helps things. If you get some weird messages, it’s best to make an appointment with a ‘Genius’ at the Apple Store and have them take a look at your machine.

And I won’t mention anything about making regular backups. Ooops. I just did… If it makes you feel any better, take a gander at my tale of “I don’t need no stinking backups” here.

Any rate, I figure that I am not alone in the world and if this is happening to me, it is likely happening to others… Possibly yourself (cue ominous music here).