I've purchased an audiobook from iTunes but it will not allow me to put it on my iPod

Question

I've just purchased an audiobook from the iTunes Store for my son.

Sadly, iTunes will not allow me to transfer the book to his iPod. It gives a warning message saying it could could not transfer the book as I am not authorised to do so on this computer.

I've never had a problem putting music on his iPod, and I have just bought this book from Apple for him and have not transferred it to any other device.

Solution

iTunes stores computer authorization as a secure certificate and sometimes isn't helpful in correcting problems with the chain of trust.

The general procedure to correct iTunes authorization issues is to perform the following steps:

1. Set the time to be close to the true time on your computer (within a minute or two is fine).
2. Have the OS set the time automatically from a time server.
3. Launch iTunes
4. Choose to reauthorize the computer from the iTunes -> Store menu
5. Choose to authorize the computer from the iTunes -> Store menu

At this point, the computer should have retrieved a valid authorization cert/token and you can try again to sync purchased content from iTunes to the devices it controls. Should my brief set of steps fail, there are many more resources on troubleshooting authorization issues here:

• http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/authorization/

Comments

[slhck]

Don't know much about the specifics, but are the accounts you used to purchase the audiobook and the iTunes account on the iPod the same?

[Admin]

That seems likely to have been a red herring. Home Sharing is a feature which allows you to access music from another machine on a local network -- it has nothing to do with iPods.