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That was odd – after upgrading to iTunes 6, trying to play my purchased music brought up the authorization dialog. After entering the password, it said I was authorized, then another dialog box said “Error -208″ and the songs wouldn’t play.

A quick search on discussions.apple.com found this, which linked to this fine blog post:

“My friend Jason couldn’t authorize iTunes to play some songs he’d purchased (on the same machine he’d purchased them on), and he found the answer on a discussion board:

% sudo mkdir -p /Users/Shared
% sudo chmod 777 /Users/Shared

Doing some investigating of my own, I found a hidden “SC Info” folder that directly links to the iTunes authorization mechanism. I deleted the folder and iTunes prompted me to enter my authorization information again, and then the folder was there again. The folder contains only a single file:

[8:18am iacas@Gaia:/Users/Shared/SC Info] % lis
total 8
drwxrwxrwx 3 iacas wheel 102 May 2 08:17 ./
drwxrwxrwt 3 root wheel 102 May 2 08:17 ../
-rw-rw-rw- 1 iacas wheel 200 May 2 08:17 SC Info.sidb

Wonder what “SC” and “si” (db = database I would imagine) stand for… At any rate, a useful and helpful hint to those having trouble getting authorization to “stick.”"

Same procedure applies for Windows systems – delete “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\SC Info”, and you’re done.

Crap. Apple really need to fix their installers. I’m also still getting the “iTunes couldn’t update the standard audio player” error…

Related posts:

1. iTunes needs to move to the cloud. Seriously. This weekend I went through another major re-install on my...