The latest culprit: Apple iTunes on Windows

Ok, so I bought Kim an iPod Nano for her birthday – she’s only been begging for one for about 3 years…

• I installed iTunes on our PC using a dedicated Administrator account then logged back in with a Limited User account (Actually we are all Guests and depend on the default Windows XP inclusion of AUTHENTICATED and INTERACTIVE in the Users group).
• As a Limited User we could rip music off CDs we own (Apparently illegal in Australia).
• We could sync those songs onto the iPod with no problems
• We could play the songs with no problems
• We bought some tracks from the iTunes Music Store and downloaded them
• The played perfectly on the PC
• We synced them to the iPod
• They would not play!

The symptom: Whenever we tried to play the purchased songs on the iPod, it would simply skip them all very quickly

Apple’s iPod Support pages were of no assistance – I went through “the five Rs” and had absolutely no change in function, and authorised/deauthorised the PC many times.

It was only after 6+ hours of incredibly frustrating, tedious, tiresome diagnosis that it occurred to me that it could be permissions related – it was a last ditch effort and I thought it was a long shot given that we had not received a single access exception.

Yep. Bloody hell! You need to be a local Administrator for purchased music to work when synced to an iPod. Unprotected AAC’s work perfectly without Administrator access. Protected AAC’s work perfectly on the PC without Administrator access. Only if you want to play your purchased tunes on your iPod do you need to be a local Administrator. Pfff, who would want to do that?!

And now with the line that I seem to use far too many times: I can’t be the only person who has experienced this!*

Why is it not in the Apple Support pages? Why do I have to buy AppleCare to log a fault with them? For crying out loud, I’ve diagnosed the bloody problem for them already – I just want to make sure a ticket gets logged in their fault tracking system and will get resolved in the next point(less) release!

[breath] [breath] [breath]

Ok, so I’m calming down now. Everything’s fine, the iPod works – even if we have to add Administrator access to our accounts when syncing the iPod – and Kim is very happy with the new music she purchased.

* Google was NOT my friend

Update: Fixed links and typos.

Update 2: How odd – TinyMCE in WordPress had popped a strange piece of HTML in that messed up some of the links displaying (<a  xhref=”http://www.apple.com.au/itunes/” />)