iTunes redownloading past purchases as protected m4p files

Well, isn't that interesting; I had the exact same thing happen with those same Final Fantasy albums. It is not, by the way, intended in any way--it's a bug of some kind, and obviously a pretty rare one.

In my case, I did a "check for available downloads", and it found four albums--all Final Fantasy soundtracks (OST II, OST III, OST VI, and 20020220). Now, in my case, I purchased all of those back in the pre-iTunes Plus days, but had only upgraded 20020220 to Plus.

Like in your case, iTunes replaced my 256K unprotected .m4a files with 128K protected .m4p files, and chucked the good ones in the trash. Different from your case, it also replaced all of the .m4p files from the other albums with different .m4p files, but interestingly they are a few KB different in size--seems like they were reencoded or something (which is not usually the case when you re-download purchased music, in my limited experience).

So you're not crazy, that much is for sure. I'm in IT, and I noticed it was doing something funky so paused the downloads and examined things in some detail. For whatever reason, it simply decided that the new files were "better" than the old ones, which might actually be true with the protected ones (if they were reencoded using a better algorithm or something), but obviously wasn't with the Plus files that should not have been replaced.

The fact that it was with the same set of albums, and that for whatever reason all Square Enix music got pulled from the iTunes store some time in I think late December, I'm guessing is relevant. It's probably some weird bug triggered by certain previously-non-Plus albums that were deleted from their database, or something like that.

Regardless, rest assured that this was not intended behavior; I spent some time going back and forth with a mid-level tech who was very apologetic and trying to figure out what happened. He came up empty, unfortunately, although the fact that it happened to somebody else tells me that it wasn't just a one-time bug with my account.

Interestingly, I have other Final Fantasy albums (all the OSTs up through 8) that were also pulled from the iTunes store but didn't attempt to re-download; perhaps these four had been re-encoded at some point along the line or something.

You can just pull the improperly replaced 256K files out of the trash (or a backup) and chuck the new ones as a fix, and it doesn't seem to happen again after doing so (I tried re-checking for downloads and got nothing). I will post if I figure out anything else.

I just had the exact same problem with iTunes 10.5.3 re-downloading the 20020220 album, replacing my iTunes Plus m4a files with encrypted 128 kbps m4p files. I, too, had originally purchased the encrypted versions then upgraded to iTunes Plus as soon as they were available. Because my iTunes library is on a shared volume, iTunes conveniently (ha!) deleted the original m4a files (since you can't move files to the trash on a network share)! I restored the m4a iTunes Plus versions from a Time Machine backup with no problems. +1 for backups! -10 for iTunes bugs!

Interesting... I guess that means whatever weird glitch is causing this is still happening.

Given how isolated the problem is, I'm pretty sure it's in some way related to the removal of the album(s) from iTunes (which I assume was Square's doing, although their website still tells you to go buy from iTunes, ironically).

I would strongly encourage you to report the problem to Apple through the iTunes Support pages; I pointed the support person I was working with to this thread, but it's unlikely they're still following it and the more people that go through official channels to report the bug, the more likely it is to get fixed.

Bit of an update in case anybody runs across this, I've been told that the source of the bug has been identified and that it will be fixed eventually (guessing that, being such a rare occurrence it's much lower on the list than the recent large-scale changes).

Also interestingly, some (but nowhere near all) of the Final Fantasy soundtracks have re-appeared in the store (although none of the ones involved in this issue are back yet). I was even able to do a Plus upgrade on FF XI (I'd have done all my others a lot sooner if I'd known they were going to go poof).