If you’ve read your iTunes Music Store agreement well, you’ll remember that Apple is straight-up about what happens if your hard drive takes a dump. SOL (sorry out of luck ). But Lifehacker is reporting that there’s this dirty little secret that indeed you can re-download lost music. Lh couldn’t verify this claim, but three comments do confirm it. In fact, they all state that Apple gives you a whipping before resetting your account with the new download links.

So if you’re not a good boy or girl and don’t backup your music files or use RAID5 like we do here at SvenOnTech, then this may be an option. One we wouldn’t rely on, but still, an option.

One common complaint I hear from many iPod users is that the Artists section has too many redundancies in it. The most prevalent occurrence is an Artist featuring Some One. Rappers are famous for bringing on a huge posse and thus you get LL Cool J featuring Janet Jackson or Fat Joe featuring Ja Rule & Ashanti. Of course if you get enough of these featuring people going, Fat Joe will fatten up your Artist list and truth is, he’s only one artist. If you’re like me, having over 85 GB of music can make going through your artist list a bit tedious.

It would be nice if Apple added a feature that would show “Similar Artists” much like it’s wonderful “Show Duplicate Songs” feature. But you can get around this by simply searching for “featuring” in the Song field. For me, it brought up a large amount of songs that I then edited and moved the featuring mark to the song title which is common practice in liner notes. Within a few minutes, I reduced my Artist count down to 1741.

The next phase of reduction is going through all your classical music (if you have that.) Most classic works put the symphony or conductor down as the artist and then you, once again, get this bloated list. At this point a personal decision on how you’d like to handle this has to be made. If you’re more in tune to the conductor than the composer, then keep it as is. If you would rather keep everything together by composer, like I do, then go and find all your classical by sorting Genre by Classical and then make the changes. To keep the conductor in the meta file (so you can still do searches,) move their name to the Comments field.

These two changes will greatly reduce your scrolling the next time you look for LL Cool J’s song he did with Janet.