Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

This morning I was attempting to download an audiobook from the store to listen to on the drive for my vacation tomorrow and iTunes 7.0.1 gave me the following error when the download started:

stopped (err = -50)

As usual, simply typing the error message into the (mostly useless) Apple Knowledgebase returned jack squat. (I should be able to enter any error message I receive, verbatim, from any Apple product into the KB search field and be directed to a KB document that directly addresses the meaning and known resolutions of that error message, if any. I’m not asking for anything for anything unreasonable here. But that’s a rant for another post.)

So I couldn’t download this audiobook, or even find out what the cryptic error message meant. But… I did fix it! And of course, I’m sharing that fix with you.

Go to the ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Downloads folder and delete everything in it. Restart iTunes and try your download again. It should work, and I’d bet this hint will cover other iTunes downloading errors.

Hubble Discovers Dark Spot on Uranus

I don’t read Slashdot anymore (I’m still wondering how someone there will blame this on George Bush, they always do) but this was too good to pass up.