A bug in iTunes Season Pass?

Lost in iTunes

I’m a huge fan of the TV show, Lost. I’ve watched all of season one, but I was waiting for them to finish season two before I bought it… at least that was the plan before Apple came out with the season pass.

If you’re unfamiliar with the season pass, it’s basically a way for you to take advantage of the price break you get when you buy the whole season, rather than individual episodes. You pay the season price upfront, download all the episodes that are available, and new episodes automatically download when they become available. It’s been described as a subscription service, but I think that’s a little misleading. With many web subscriptions, you lose the media when you cancel your subscription. That’s not the case with season passes, you own it just as if you had bought individual episodes.

Anyway, there appears to be a bug in how Apple is doing the track numbers. Do you see it in the image above? When I first bought the season there were 19 episodes, so they are numbered 1 of 19, 2 of 19, etc… The other day a new episode was released, but it came down with the track number 20 of 20. The next one will be 21 of 21, etc…

iTunes has no way of automatically updating the track numbers for items you’ve already downloaded, so all the track numbering will be wrong when you get to the end of the season. It seems odd to me that Apple wouldn’t take this into account when numbering these to begin with.

batch change track numbers

Luckily, there is an easy way to fix this manually. Simply select all the episodes in iTunes for the season you want to change, and hit Command (Apple) + i to bring up the track info window. Since multiple episodes were selected, this window will allow you to batch change them all at once. Fill in the real number of tracks, but don’t fill in the first box under ‘track number’, those are correct, and we wouldn’t want to edit that field with multiple episodes selected or we would end up with every track having the same number.

Lost Links: iTunes | Amazon

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