Another Apple rant. Quelle surprise.
I ran across a post today that was pointing out it's been 22 years since Madonna released Ray of Light (something I noted here last month.) and this made me realize I hadn't heard the album in quite some time, so I went to fire it up in iTunes. It wasn't there.
This was odd because I know I'd purchased the album years ago and if I wasn't mistaken I'd even transferred it to my phone about six months ago. I checked my phone, and it was conspicuously absent as well. I looked up my purchases so I could download it again, thinking that perhaps I'd inadvertently deleted it from iTunes.
Sure enough, it was showing "purchased," but there was no option to download it again. After about a half hour of sleuthing, I discovered that it—and in fact MY EVERY PURCHASE I EVER MADE THROUGH ITUNES—was now located in "hidden" purchases!
It didn't seem that I was missing music from the library, and several of the "hidden" purchases played just fine, but nevertheless I started manually unhiding all the purchases, ONE BY ONE—because Apple—of course there was no option to unhide everything all at once. (Actually there was a button to "unhide all," but once again—because Apple—clicking on it didn't do a damned thing.) I gave up after restoring the two missing Madonna albums that were actually gone from my library and about a couple dozen other items, because I realized this is not how I intended to spend the rest of my afternoon.
After the two missing Madonna albums were visible again, I was able to download them.
What's weird is that it looked like the rest of my purchased music was still in my library…
IT JUST WORKS. IT JUST WORKS. IT JUST WORKS, GODDAMNIT. YOU'RE JUST USING IT WRONG!