Q: HELP! My Library keeps resetting itself

Thank you for your suggestion.  I tried this and after no improvement, I reverted to the settings I had - asking for purchases to be shown again - and then tried again.  It makes no improvement.

I have not always had this problem of genres being reset though and it would seem odd that hiding purchases that I have yet to re-download after moving iTunes onto and external drive would have any effect on genres being reset after downloading old/previously downloaded material and/or new purchases, as although this is not the first time I have experienced genres being reset, the problem has not presented after I moved iTunes to the external drive until over the last couple of weeks.  So there were first a few weeks of this not being a concern after shifting iTUnes to the external drive.  I think this has happened after an update to iTunes.  Hopefully they will sort out this bug and issue a new update very soon.

Check Edit > Preferences > Store > Share details about your library with Apple. This setting, if enabled, might also force the store metadata on you.

tt2

Hi Turingtest2, thank you for your suggestion.  You have misunderstood:  I do not want the descriptive data from iTunes/producers to dominate the definitions of my library - I want to have the genres remain as I have re-defined them or in other words, if I have bought something that comes with metadata defining the genre as "German Pop" but want it to sit in "Pop" (with all my other popular music...why wouldn't I? :-/ ), I want the redefinition of "Pop" that I have assigned it in "Info" to remain constant and not revert to "German Pop" each time I download something from the iTunes store.  And so on.  I'd rather not have a whole bunch of redundant genre descriptions when a handful will suffice and allow me to more readily use iTunes.

Aside from that, it may just be the German cynic in me, but since Apple claim to own any data that they collect from us, I'd just as much prefer not to give them (or anyone) open access to my iTunes:  Any photo's or documents as well as massive amounts of marketing material can come from such exercises and we all know information is power and money and out of our control once relinquished.  I wanted to use Siri but read the same warning from Apple when setting it up and backed away from that too.

Thank you again though for your offer of help - I appreciate it.

I understood, but perhaps I could have phrased my point better. If you have that option (Share details...) enabled you may want to turn it off (as well as Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases) because that might be the reason you are seeing the store's version of the metadata.

A while back I wrote a script called ExportImport that can used to save selected metadata from one of the backups of the library database in the Previous iTunes Libraries folder, and then used to reimport that data back into the current library. You could use that (with a little edit) to recover the lost genre data or to backup the current information once you've repaired it again. See this thread for details.

Ideally you would also keep and update a complete backup of your library that you could restore if anything untoward happens to the library. The mechanism I use should alert you if something goes wrong as there would be more proposed overwrites when previewing an update than expected.

tt2

Would love your inputs on this - iTunes settings keep getting Reset lately. What files/ registry info does iTunes read to trigger this?

You have intense knowledge of files and folders etc of iTunes and how it uses them (from some of your great tutorials/ posts).

Got it, see you over in your thread.

tt2