Where did these albums come from on my iTunes?

Cafe Society
1

Short version: A few albums have mysteriously appeared in my iTunes, that I don’t know where they came from. The albums include a couple by the Beatles, and something called “Bernstein Children’s Classics”, with Peter and the Wolf, The Carnival of the Animals, and a few others.

Long version: In an effort to free up space on my primary hard drive, the other day I moved my music library to a much larger external drive. Since I was doing that anyway, I also did something else I’d been meaning to: I have an account on this computer for my mom to use when she visits (mostly for checking her e-mail), and I’d thought for a while that I’d like to be able to play music on that account, so I went into iTunes on her account and set that to use the same library.

Well, I told iTunes to load that folder, and suddenly, at the top of the list, there’s Abbey Road. I like the Beatles as much as the next guy, but I’m certain that I’ve never bought one of their albums (almost all of what I’ve bought is either folk or classical). I look a bit further, and it appears that I also have Magical Mystery Tour. All right, let’s take a look at the whole list… Hm, here are some titles I don’t recognize under Classical: “Bernstein Children’s Classics”. Well, OK, I might have bought that: There was one point where I got a really good deal on a whole huge stack of classical CDs; maybe I loaded it on then and just forgot to organize it… but I don’t think I did.

Well, OK, I’m happy, although puzzled, about this. Even if I wouldn’t bother paying for them, sure, I’ll take a couple of Beatles albums for free. So I go back to my other account, and double-check, searching for Beatles in my library. Nothing. So then I tell iTunes to load the folder it was already pointing at, and… The same thing happens. The two Beatles albums and the Bernstein show up now.

The best I can guess is that at some point, Apple threw in a few albums free with iTunes as a promotional, and they were just lurking in there somewhere, latent, waiting to be activated (which I apparently somehow did). They might have had a sampling of a variety of different genres, and those are just the only ones I noticed. But I don’t think I’ve heard of anything like that, and the whole point of a promotional is that you, well, promote it.

Any other guesses?

2

Is it possible your mother bought them from iTunes? There should be a default playlist for purchased media in the iTunes sidebar, so if it’s in there, that’s what happened. If you don’t see a purchased playlist, create a new smart playlist that includes only purchases.

If that doesn’t help, checking for both when the songs were added to your iTunes Library and their file creation date might give you more context for how they came to be. For example, if their creation date is the same day as the songs from that stack of classical CDs you got, it might be there were a few Beatles CDs mixed in in mislabeled jewel cases.

It wasn’t a promotional thing though, I know that much. The only major promotional giveaway iTunes ever had was for a new U2 album and that did not work out well for anyone (except maybe for U2 who were paid $100 million by Apple, so just imagine how much the Beatles would have wanted).

3

0% chance of that. My mom’s technique for buying anything online (or, for that matter, doing anything at all online beyond checking her e-mail) is to call me up and ask me to do it for her, and even if she were buying music for herself, the Beatles aren’t the first thing she’d go for, either.

I’ll check the other things this evening, though.

4

OK, I think I figured out part of it, at least: Many years ago, I bought a used iPod from a friend. When I plugged it in to set it up, it synched itself to my computer, which meant putting some music on the computer. There are a couple of albums which I thus have in my library, but which I’ve never actually bothered to play, because they’re not my style. Those known albums from that iPod have last-modified dates within a few days of the dates on the mysterious Beatles albums, both long before any of my own iTunes-related files. So presumably, those are the dates my friend got those albums, probably shortly after getting the iPod to play them on.

Which still doesn’t explain why they never showed up in my library before, but we’re now to the point that it can probably just be chalked up to “unexplained glitch”.

5

What is the date added for the Beatles into your iTunes Library? That could explain the unexplained.

6

I can’t find the exact date, but everything in my library currently shows up under “recently added”, presumably because of the same rejiggering I did that caused the mysterious albums to show up.

7

Except usually when you sync your iPod up to your computer, it takes whatever’s on your computer and puts it on the iPod, not the other way around. It would be too easy to steal music that way; people could just exchange iPods all day and transfer the music to their computer.

Are you sure there’s not something going on with the Cloud? Maybe a nearby network you’re picking up, and seeing someone else’s library? That freaked me out when my wife (girlfriend at the time, scandalous) moved in, and I found songs suddenly on my iTunes I had never seen before. Turns out it merged our libraries because we were on the same network. How poetic.

8

Well, if you still want to explore the mystery, to see when the song was added to the library, change your library view from “Recently Added” to “Songs.” Then in the menubar, click “View,” then choose “Show View Options.” In the View Options window, under “Stats” click the “Date Added” box. A new “Date Added” column will show up in the Songs list and you can see exactly when the Beatles were added.

Provided you didn’t create a brand new library when you did your rejiggering (which would give all the songs the same date added info), at least you’ll be able rule out that you’ve just been overlooking the Beatles this entire time.

9

And yet it happened. It’s certainly not just someone else’s network nearby, because I know that a couple of those albums have persisted in my library over the span of six years and 1700 miles, and showed up right when I got the iPod. And it’s not like it’s hard to steal music, anyway: They’re all just mp3 files that can be copied like any other file.

After I set up my mom’s account and saw the Beatles albums, I went back to my own account and searched iTunes for “Beatles”. No hits, until after I loaded the folder.

As it happens, I’ll be talking with the friend who sold me the iPod later tonight. I’ll ask him about it, too.