There are few things more infuriating than eagerly purchasing the latest album by your favourite band from iTunes, transferring to your device of choice and heading off for a trip only to find one or more of the tracks have been truncated due to an incomplete download. This seems to happen to me a lot but maybe I’m just unlucky.
Anyway, how to fix the problem? Well firstly, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way of doing this in iTunes, at least not in version 11.1.1.11. In the past you could visit the store, locate the track in question and choose to purchase the track again. Having figured out that you had already purchased the item iTunes would respond by asking if you would like to download again. You’d just confirm and all would be well.
This doesn’t seem to be possible in iTunes 11.1.1.11 because if you go to the store all you can do is play the track. No good if the track is broken! It won’t download again and the track will remain broken.
Figure 1 - No option to download or purchase again in the store.
The solution
Now that all your music is in the cloud it seems reasonable that you should be able to get at it again. This is how I do it.
Step 1. Find the affected file on your disk drive and delete it.
Step 2. Start iTunes, navigate to the affected track and try to play it. iTunes will respond by saying it can’t find the track and invites you to locate the file. In the image below the track Blood Drive was truncated so I have deleted it from my disk drive.
Figure 2 – Prompted to locate the missing file.
Step 3. Cancel the dialog and the cloud icon will reappear to the right of the track.
Figure 3 – The cloud icon should now be available.
Step 4. Click the cloud icon to download the file again.