Dummy "Purchase Date" metadata being populated in non-purchased file info

This happened to me — to my music files, I mean — in the Spring of 2007, which means I'd have been running the most current, then, version of Tiger and whatever was then the most current version of iTunes.

Some of the music files, but not all of them, suddenly had purchase date metadata. Most odd was the fact that, at that time, I had not yet purchased one single single from iTunes. The iTunes store would have been always turned off in my preferences. I had no iTunes Store account. I had never, obviously, even logged into the store. And, yet, one day that metadata appeared, applied to (some of the) tracks that I had ripped from my own CDs.

My solution was to rerip the CDs. In each case, I replaced the songs (I did not delete and then add), ripping over the extant files and their corrupt metadata. The proper metadata was saved (date added and play counts and last played dates, et cetera), but this eliminated the purchase dates.

I do not recall what the purchase date was that was added, but yours sounds oddly familar to what mine was. It was a date that, in my case, substantially predated my even having iTunes, let alone the affected files.

I have since discovered that this also affects the metadata for songs purchased from the iTunes store. For instance, I set up an account the following autumn so that I could grab the free download of Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere" before the album Magic was released. When I bought and ripped the CD, the ripped version of "Radio Nowhere" kept all the metadata except the purchase date, which disappeared.

I wish I could tell you how or why this happened to me or offer you an easier fix. At the very least, I hope it helps some to know you're not alone.

N.

Steve A. wrote:
even stranger is the fact that it only affects a handful of artists - but aside from only one artist (right now the exception to the rule - I have 9500 tracks to scan), it affects practically every track in every album by these artists.

This distribution is consistent with what happened to my library to the degree that there were similar exceptions with my infection — only some artists, almost all of those artists' albums, et cetera. (I do not recall albums being partially corrupted; I remember all songs on an album were either corrupted or they were all clean.)

This could, maybe, be what we have in common:

When this happened to me, my primary computer was a new Macbook, which I had purchased to replace an aging iMac G3 (400 MHz). I had some significant hardware issues with the Macbook, and it spent a lot of time away from home, visiting the Apple techs. When it was in the shop, I would use my iMac to run iTunes for playback over the HiFi, syncing an iPod Nano, and ripping music.

When the Macbook would return home, I would always perform a fresh reinstall of Mac OS. Then, along with my other data, I'd copy the iTunes library and preference files that had been running on the iMac (but which had originated on the Macbook) back to the Macbook.

My "Purchase Date" problem happened in the general vicinity of April 2007, which was shortly after that Macbook came back from the shop for the last time. It would not be until the following autumn that my OCD got the better of me and I reripped all of those CDs to eradicate that bogus metadata, but, when I sifted through all of the files and looked at all of the metadata in the months that followed the infection, it seemed as if there was a clear line on the calendar after which files were safe (although there was not a line on the other side; files that had been in the library since its inception had been compromised by the bogus data).

I did not consider this at the time, and I don't have a concrete memory of the situation, but, if your iBook and your Intel iMac are sharing iTunes's metadata, as did my Macbook and iMac, I wonder if that could somehow be related to the problem.

If that is the case (and, although my solution was not intentional), after my G3 was finally able to retire, the problem stopped occurring. Of course, even if your computers do share your iTunes library, this could be a total coincidence and it doesn't mean that it solved nor caused the corruption.

Steve A. wrote:

I might just have to chalk this up to the ghost in the machine

That's the most sane option, certainly.

This is likely just more sound and fury that likely will only signify the usual:

When I had this issue, iTunes 7.1 and 7.1.1 had just been introduced and, with them, enhanced sorting which meant, of course, that Bob Dylan, at least in my iTunes library, could now go live under the letter B, that Neil Young moved from the middle to the end of the library, et cetera.

There may have been exceptions to this, but, as I remember it, the vast majority of the affected artists in my library were artists whose names were individual names rather than band names: Jay Farrar's songs were contaminated, but Uncle Tupelo's and Son Volt's were not. Lowell George, Patterson Hood, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, their songs would have been corrupted. The songs of Little Feat; Drive-By Truckers; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and Traveling Wilburys all would have been uncorrupted. (I do not remember there being any exceptions to this, but I can't be positive.)

I recall that it was not as easy as I thought it should have been to switch to sorting by surname, and I had a devil of a time getting the "Apply Sort Field" command to work for me as I thought it should. Now, I edit that information exclusively in Get Info's "Sorting" tab for single and multiple items and, until I went to look for it while writing this, had forgotten it still existed. Still, one thing that all my affected files would have had in common is that they all would have recently been modified to hold new "sorting" metadata via that command.

Pointing my finger at the Apply Sort Field command, or a bug within it (or that +had been+ within it) doesn't sound likely, especially since your problem occurred with 9.x. If it were that simple, this problem would be more widespead, I'm sure. But that's all I've got left — other than that I was also eating a lot of beef and had virtually no fish in my diet when my files were corrupted.

If you ever figure this out, please let us know. The memory alone is driving me nuts.