How can I download fresh copies of EVERY purchase?

Question

I tried iTunes Match for a while and found that it took forever to download music to any of my devices, so was basically useless. I turned it off everywhere - iPad, iPhone, Mac. After doing this, I started noticing that many songs were corrupted - they play part way through, then are truncated somewhere in the latter half of the song. Upon investigation, many are also missing. It turns out that well over a thousand songs are affected, all purchased from the Apple Store over the last decade. I have a backup on Crashplan, but it has since been overwritten by the damaged material. I have now been testing songs one at a time for days. I have no way of telling if they are damaged except to scroll to the end of the song and see if it has an ending or not, or attempt to play it to see if it turns up missing. If I could, I would perform a search on iTunes for every song in my "purchased" list and then delete them all, then just re-download them, but this does not appear to be possible. It's enough to make me want to drink a Drain-o cocktail. There must be a way to have iTunes just replace every song it has a history of with a new, fresh copy. Right? I can't believe I *paid* for this "service."

Answer 1

Thanks, but I am all too familiar with this feature. I have been painstakingly doing this for days. I have over 2k of songs in the Purchases section of iTunes. What I would like to do is bypass the mind-numbing task of finding and deleting only the songs that are listed there, and simply replace every matching song with a fresh, uncorrupted copy. Why does iTunes require that the corrupted copy be deleted first? Isn't there an option to bypass that ridiculous requirement and just refresh what's there? Especially when iTunes is what messed everything up in the first place? I already mistakenly replaced an iPod ($250) and bought a new external hard drive before I realized what was going on. I'm really quite angry that this could happen and there appears to be no way to fix it. ITunes Match is a horrible, horrible thing! Not only does it not work at all, but it hoses your library too!