Since the last iTunes update - 7.6 (29) on OS X Leopard and 7.6.0.29 on Windows XP - I can't play any tracks from Radiohead's album In Rainbows. These are the 160 kbps MP3 files that I purchased directly from Radiohead last year in their Internet "honesty box" experiment. I paid £4.45 for the album which seemed a fair price for both parties in the transaction. (At the then current exchange rate it showed up on my credit card as $9.05 US.)
Now I can't play the album in iTunes on OS X or Windows. But it plays just fine in Quicktime 7.4.1 (14) on OS X and Quicktime 7.4 on Windows. And it plays fine in every other media player that I have tried - Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, etc. So what's going on? It seems unlikely that this is just a coincidence when combined with the fact that Radiohead and Apple have started selling In Rainbows on iTunes. Is there something more sinister at work? Is Radiohead trying to punish the reported 62% of downloaders who paid nothing for the album? How can I get to the bottom of this?
Update: I downloaded the album again using the original download link from my sales receipt and it plays now. The files from the download did not match what I already had in iTunes. Apparently my version of the MP3s had been modified so that they did not work with iTunes (but did with every other media player). It probably happened when I used iTunes to add the album artwork to the MP3 metadata. All very odd but not sinister. Anyway, mad props to Radiohead for still allowing me to download the album four months after I originally purchased it.

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