This weekend I went and downloaded a BIOS update for my computer and discovered a nasty little side effect – all of my iTunes songs that I had purchased required re-authorization. Apparently, iTunes uses your computer’s BIOS (or a hash of it, or something) to uniquely identify your computer. So, if you update your BIOS, it’s as if you had transferred all your iTunes songs to a new computer. And since you only get 5 transfers per song… well you always want to minimize the number of transfers.
Just a nasty little secret of iTunes (and DRM – digital rights management) that I discovered and wanted to share. Beware!
I experienced the same problem. However, as it is stated on the apple website (link below) you will be able to “deauthorise all” computers on your account once a year which will resolve our problem. The option, however, only becomes visible if you have authorised 5 computers. See link.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93014
Hey, good to know! That actually makes it not so bad if you can do that once per year.
Useful info . Thank you. I will give it to others.