On the other hand, it’s also hard to express just how sorry we are that such a thing happened. I definitely hope that the way in which we engaged the community in the past few days sent a clear message that we were nothing short of completely dedicated to solving this issue as rapidly as possible while ensuring that this problem is gone for good.

At this time, the updated iPod Add-On should already be available on the Add-On site and disabled version of the Add-On should also auto-update to the version with the fix.

The problem itself stemmed from a code change that was made to the methods used to collate (i.e. order) properties that are numbers. It turns out that the collator was a little too smart for its own good. This, combined with the way the persistent IDs are generated in iTunes and stored on the iPod, led the Add-On to believe it was operating on Track A when, really, it was operating on Track B. With this confusion, it was possible for the iPod Add-On to erase certain tracks because it was essentially attempting to de-duplicate the contents of the iPod when mounting and synchronizing. It may have also simply removed references to these tracks from the iPod. This would leave the content on the iPod but the content would no longer be associated with the iPod Library, which would make it seem like it disappeared from the iPod.

We’d also like to point out a few potential misconceptions about this issue.

• This issue did not affect the iTunes Library.
• There were no ill effects for iPods that were managed using Songbird. Only songs synced through iTunes are affected.
• This issue is akin to losing or having ones iPod break. While it is unfortunate, it should normally be possible to repopulate your iPod using the original source (eg. Your music library on your laptop).
• Users that did not upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1 and ran into this problem will see their collection restored after installing or updating to the new iPod Add-On.

Since then, we’ve crafted test cases to ensure that this problem never happens again.

We hope you’ll come back to us!