I had a bit of a scare yesterday. I spent £6.41 completing the soundtrack from Moon (I’d already bought two tracks from the album, hence the discount on completing it) on iTunes. All was well until the final track, Welcome to Lunar Industries (Three Year Stretch….) downloaded – and failed.
I started with common-sense troubleshooting methods – error -100000 (the error returned by iTunes) wasn’t mentioned on the Apple support website, so I assume it is one that is as-yet undefined. I ran “check for available downloads”, and it happened again.
Undeterred, I tried again, deleting the temporary download folder and running “Check for Available Downloads” again. This time, instead of bailing out with an error, as soon as it reached the end of the download phase, it simply deleted the downloaded file and restarted again. This repeated seemingly endlessly and for no readily apparent reason.
I tried on another machine, and that failed. I updated the Mac to iTunes 8.2.1. Again, no luck. With that in mind, I contacted Apple technical support.
The person who dealt with my request was very polite and e-mailed me back within six hours (impressive, considering it was a Saturday). I’d tried practically everything in the e-mail, but for old time’s sake, I tried again.
It was another case of lather-rinse-repeat – until I decided, off the cuff, to try something different. Instead of using the Check for Available Downloads route, I clicked the ‘restart’ button on the entry in the Downloads playlist. And it worked.
I e-mailed the fix back to Apple, and received a speedy (probably template) “thank you for contacting iTunes Store customer support” message. It may have been template, but the service is certainly better than some companies I’ve run in to: for example, Apple got back to me on a Saturday (most other companies wouldn’t have bothered until Monday) and the person who served me was incredibly polite throughout the brief communiqué.

