rifsuda01: Undo in iTunes

Tuesday, 24 May 2011

Undo in iTunes

It is an unfortunate fact that iTunes doesn't have an 'Undo' function for some operations. Today, I discovered that force quitting may reverse a recent blunder.

My mistake happened in Podcasts. My 'This American Life' Podcast collection is a long freckled list of unheard, listened, and partially played programs. I accidentally marked the lot of them as new; meaning I would have no way of knowing which ones I'd heard and how much of them I had heard of them.

After brief pause and a few futile attempts of punching Command+Z, I force-quit iTunes and hoped that the library XML file had not yet been written to. It appears that it was not; when I relaunched my Podcast list showed heterogeneous blue dots.

[crarko adds: This sounds like a case of getting a little lucky. I suppose it's worth trying if you make a grievous mistake and want to try getting out of it. You could also risk messing up the XML Property List file, so hopefully there is a current back ...