-
All replies
-
Helpful answers
-
May 23, 2015 10:23 PM in response to turingtest2by BikerRally,No, I'm not fooling around with iTunes variables at all. I just simply told iTunes where to place my music whenever I inserted a CD/DVD. And that worked. I could go to that folder and see the individual sub-folders that iTunes created by Artist and/genre. And then once inside iTunes, everything appeared normal. I could look according genre, Artist, etc. Everything appears normal ... I am receiving no error messages from iTunes or that there is anything out of the ordinary.
It's just that music files disappear randomly. There is no warning or indication of any kind that there is something wrong with the 'Media' file or any of iTunes internal workings. The music just simply disappears. For no obvious reason. This happens so often (daily) that I am about to give up on iTunes ... unless a reason can be found and a fix applied. To me, it's buggy software.
My computer runs very soundly. I have anti-virus (one of the best available) and.anti-malware and I have closed all but the nessary ports for entry into my system. I.have no other software problems on my system ... and believe me I have a lot of other software available, and everything on my system runs like a Swiss watch. But iTunes is the exception. I guess even Apple can't be perfect.
-
May 24, 2015 7:45 AM in response to BikerRallyby turingtest2,The Lost & Found playlists should identify exactly which files were missing at a particular point in time.
If you've made a complete backup with SyncToy you should be able to spot if any further files go missing and restore them from the backup manually. Is there any pattern. I'm not aware of any mechanism which could cause iTunes to delete files at random. The fact that you've already found some corrupted files would make me worry about the stability of that drive.
How big is the library? How big is the drive? It's unlikely, but could your drive be a fake?
tt2
-
May 24, 2015 11:41 AM in response to turingtest2by BikerRally,tt2,
I don't have a 'lost and found' playlist. I don't know how that would be setup. I know exactly which songs are missing by the exclamation mark by the song name. One day the song is there, the next day it's gone. It is random. When I'm playing a playlist or the whole library in say shuffle mode, and the music stops, then I go look and the playlist stopped because it ran into a missing song. I can see the name of the song and the album with the exclamation mark. It has mysteriously disappeared.
I like listening to my music while I work on the computer, but this problem is becoming a real pain. It's sixes whether to go get the missing song from the backup or just go grab the CD and replace it that way because it is happening so frequently.
You mentioned 'corrupted files', but I don't remember saying anything about that. The only 'corrupted files' would be the missing music files. All of the music files are placed in the 'media folder' (My Music) as .mp3, even though they are coming off the CD/DVD as .wav files. That's iTunes decision. I'm not even sure iTunes can store and use an .wav file.
The hard drive is a Western Digital 2TB in NTSF format (D:). I'm a photographer and I have all of my images on that drive as well and have not lost one ... that I know of so far, but I hoping not. I do have offsite storage (Carbonite) of my image files.
The iTunes media file (D:My Music) contains 1,689 files in 289 foldes which I add to occasionally and which iTunes subtracts from randomly (that would seem funny, if it didn't **** me off so much). I do not make folders or change folders or their names. I don't touch anything that iTunes has set up.
All of that said, I can only surmise that the iTunes program has bugs. I've never worked with a program before that just randomly removes files. In the last week, iTunes has removed 12 songs, all of them from different sources (CD/DVD) and which I now have to go dig out those CD/DVD's and restore the randomly removed files. I'll probably get around to that ... whenever. I used to restore them right away whenever I found one or two missing, but now that it happens ALL OF THE TIME, it is a real hassle.
I told you earlier that I would run a chkdsk on that drive. I have not yet. But leaving myself a note to start that up when I go to bed tonight.
Thanks again for your help tt2. I am really hoping that we can solve this problem or at least get it passed on to Apple as a 'Trouble Ticket'.
-
May 24, 2015 12:39 PM in response to BikerRallyby turingtest2,From earlier in this thread.
Lost & Found Playlists
Create a playlist called Found, select everything in Music and drag it into the Found playlist (it may take some time to count the tracks that are to be dropped). Create a smart playlist called Lost matching All the rules Playlist is Music and Playlist is not Found. Your lost tracks will be in this playlist.
Each time you start iTunes it assumes every track is where it is supposed to be. The exclamation marks only show if it tries to access the tracks. It may be that a large swathe of your media files were deleted at one time through a single action, e.g. reboot when the drive was active, but that you only become aware of missing items piece by piece.
You said:
When I looked at those errors, they were really not 'Music'. They were for tuning my guitar and following some riffs. What surprised me was the amount/size of the error files. Up in the six figures and I know those files are not that big. But that is neither here nor there.
That suggests something fairly major happened at some point.
You choose your import settings under Edit > Preferences > General > Import Settings. Anything other than .wav can carry a tag, so I would generally not recommend choosing .wav as an import format. .wav makes moving files between libraries much more complicated, and if the database is ever corrupted rebuilding it is a nightmare.
iTunes doubtless has some bugs, but it routinely manages libraries of 50,000+ tracks without randomly deleting files, so one suspects something specific is going on for you which is out of the ordinary.
tt2