Delete a purchased file from ITunes Download Queue without downloading file

Question

This is related to an earlier question, but the advice there doesn't work for me. My disk space is full. Whenever I open iTunes, it tries to download some purchases that I don't want anymore (old Lost episodes) that I haven't wanted for years. All that I want to do is cancel these downloads. Deleting them in itunes doesn't work. The recommended advice on an earlier question is to finish downloading them, then delete them, but I can't do this for diskspace reasons (there are about seventeen episodes, so it's not practical for me to sit there and slowly deleted enough diskjunk to download an episode at a time, then delete the episode - and even if it were, it seems rude to hog this much bandwidth.) Any other solution?

Answer 1

I had a download (a Lost episode in fact) that wouldn't stop downloading. Even though it was already in my library, it would download every time I checked for purchases and then error out at the end of the download.

I don't remember everything I tried, but a tried a LOT of things to get it to stop. The only thing that eventually worked for me was contacting iTunes Support: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/contact/

They had the item removed from my queue within a couple hours. It will probably expedite things if you give them the exact episode names and numbers as they appear in the iTunes Store.

Answer 2

Remove Them from Store=>Purchased Playlist

iTunes 10.7.0.21 on my Windows 7 machine seems to automatically download only those items in the Store=>Purchased "playlist". In my case, deleting a movie from Store=>Purchased stopped it from being added to the download queue automatically.

To download purchased items that have been removed from Store=>Purchased, go to Store=>Purchased=>Download Previous Purchases and find the item there.