Songs Disappearing from iTunes

skotfromkingston wrote:

So, it's hard to know who to reply to about all this, but here goes. I posted a few months back that a whole bunch of my library--a totally random selection of about half of my stuff, both iTunes purchased and uploaded CDs--had disappeared.

Did it disappear from iTunes library and the hard drive also? Was/is it still in the iTunes media folder (/My Music/iTunes/iTunes media/Music/)?iTunes has dropped items from the library but they were still present in the media folder.

When is Apple going to really deal with this situation and offer people the free software to get their music back? Hello? Apple? Hello? Do you all get the feeling that Apple isn't listening?

They have really dealt with the situation.

You can redownload iTunes purchased music & apps from iCloud. Non iTunes purcahsed music can be redownloaded if you use iTunes Match.

However, it is always best practice to maintain a local backup (not the iPod) of anything.

Wow you must be really ****** cos you posted that like, three times 😀 Well I kinda decided to get an external drive in the next couple of weeks to back up all my music and stuff.

Unfortunately I had a bash at trying to get my new tracks onto my ipod, and found some instructions on how to manually sync... which was great but i ended up reading the wrong set, and clearing out my whooooole ipod .. oops. Anyway I reloaded my library back onto it but obviously missing the 22 tracks that had been lost by itunes.

I just want to clarify the following though about the tracks that are completely lost. They are nowhere on my computer, and what is strange was that I had deliberately duplicated some songs so they would sit in multiple "albums". However Itunes has lost both copies of the songs, even though they were two independent files. Thats really odd... The other thing was that all these songs are from *ahem* "downloads" from a few years back, and I wonder if this has anything to do with it?

Whats Itunes match? And does it charge you? If you can ust freely download using I tunes match , how do they know people arent just randomly going saying "hey you lost my David Bowie track and I want it back" when in reality, they may have never had the track in the first place....

I dont know about "skotfromkingston" but mine have completely disappeared from the i tunes media library... I was really stupid and deleted all my wma files because I thought that everything was safe in itunes media. Obviously I never randomly lost any of my tracks when i was using Windows media player and syncing with an Mp3, so I had no reason to suspect they may have been a problem with all the media in Itunes.

I was wondering about this stuff too. Here's the info.

"Chris CA" to I think answer your question, the music that was gone, was gone, except for the titles, so that when I backed up to an external hard drive, believing all my music to be intact, it exported "empty" song titles.

I have hundreds of songs that show errors saying the originals are missing. Additionally, I clear duplicates regularly yet they reappear. Many songs have 6 or 8 duplicates that take up space.

I'm moving back to my old Toshiba 40 gig and getting out of iTunes.

My music keeps mysteriously disappearing from my itunes, iphone and ipod. It is completely frustrating and I have no idea how much I have lost because I just notice it when I go to look for the song or album.

Although I didn´t actually find a solution to the problem, I found out that, in my case, the added songs appear on Smart Playlist.This is, ofcourse, once you edit the settings in a particular manner, for example: date added is before (I just changed the year to 2014), and the playlist should contain ( put in a really large number of songs or gbs).

As I said before, it didn´t show the songs on the music folder, but I was finally able to play all the songs on itunes from a smart playlist, which is basically the same.

******* thing!!!Trying to connect my wife and dauther macs thru itunes to the external drive... Itunes deleted about 23000 mp3(!!!!) from my external drive!!!!!! All my library. Im ******* devastated! Took me months to digitalize all my cd's

Apple was totally useless about this problem. Whatever it is, they seem to either not be able to fix it, or have no will to. (Are you listening Apple? Hello??!!) They did offer to let me re-download any of my purchased stuff for free, but like you this did not solve the problem of all the CDs I'd spent hours and hours uploading. In the end, I purchased software that would allow me to upload the music from my iPod, as the songs still existed there, and now I am super careful about checking the files before I back up to an external source. If your music is still on your iPod, I'd go this route. Annoying and costs $, but I couldn't come up with anything else.

Oh, and then you'll likely have to deal with the issue of all the songs appearing in duplicate. This is because, if your situation is like mine, the iTunes Library is intact, but the music files are gone. When you re-upload the music, you get a duplicate library. Careful about deleting any of these titles: I found this led to the same problem I'd had to begin with (and therein may be a clue to the problem in the first place, I don't know). It is actually better to hold your breath and completely erase everything in your iTunes, and then upload from your iPod.

When I purchased my first iPod a number of years ago, I thought, okay, I'm sold, this is incredibly, beautifully smart, I'm now an Apple geek, and will eventually purchase an Apple computer when I need a new one. (Still don't; my cheap ACER chugs along with not a blip, and Windows 7 is dandy). This experience dealing with Apple has seriously shaken my faith, not because I do not accept that bugs will happen in these amazing machines and the associated software, but because there seems to be no response from Apple. It's not costing them anything to not deal with this incredibly frustrating problem. (Except the computer I'm not buying; but given the riots in their China stores, I doubt they care much about me).

Like you.. i think Apple does not really care.. i bet the only answer they will give me is: Now we have iclouds for your backup. I migth have a backup somewhere but i really had trouble sleeping and im really depress just thinking that my entire Bach collection is just wipe!!!! Thanks for your reply. Im not alone.....

diGitum wrote:

Like you.. i think Apple does not really care.. i bet the only answer they will give me is: Now we have iclouds for your backup. I migth have a backup somewhere but i really had trouble sleeping and im really depress just thinking that my entire Bach collection is just wipe!!!!

Since this was obviously important to you, just restore from your most recent backup.

Since you backup regularly, that should ease your problem of sleepless nights.🙂

I just connected to my iMac from an iBook through Screen Sharing to see if I had purchased a song, and launched iTunes through the connection. iTunes came up, then showed me three buttons about how I can add songs to my library. I thought it was odd, but clicked the "Search my Hard Drive" to add songs. It took so long, I went to bed, and the next morning I checked my computer to see if it was done, and to my surprise only 26 songs are in my library!!

I have NEVER in my life pirated songs...I have bought every single one from the iTunes store (except for ones I legitimately own and digitized from CD), and that's over a thousand or so songs! So to see 26 there is ridiculous. My iPhone has way more than that, so now I'm afraid to sync my phone and lose all of my music.

Where the heck is my music?? This makes me really nervous. Please help!

it seems you are a **** as me... the songs purchased from itunes you can download tehm again.. the rest.. its lost... i lost over 23000 mp3 with their stupid system!!!! I have digitalize all my father classical collection, all my cd , my brother, my wife, etc... week and week and week to put them in mp3... all lost... im still not over it.

Be careful, iTunes apparently isn't all that smart about video files either. I had a bunch of shorter video files (all saved as mp4, but playable on my iPod) turn up unplayable in iTunes this week. The files still play in Quicktime Pro, so the problem is solely that iTunes can't grok something in the generic mp4 container format anymore. When I click on the files in iTunes (or in the finder for QuickLook) I only get the audio portion of the file. The video portion and the associated artwork are "missing." But since the files still play just fine in Quicktime, it seems to be more of a decoding problem. I've noticed that a lot of things have been getting more and more braindead the last few releases of the system -- which is why I'm still running Snow Leopard instead of Lion. I don't feel like turning my big, souped up desktop machine into a giant iPad without a touch screen.

I've also noticed a number of older mp3s that turn up with the duration and bit fields wiped, making them unplayable.

As for ripping copies of media you've already paid for: I thought that portion of the DCRM had been challenged on the same grounds that Sony vs Betamax has succesfully been used a number of times to allow consumers to pay for a movie or music album ONCE, rather than for each type of media they wish to keep it for private use.

This is as bad as finding out I'd lost an entire directory of artwork when I migrated from my old machine to this one. No clue where the files went, they just didn't make it to this machine's disks. It's a good thing I had multiple backups of the machine that died (live backups, not the files that TimeMachine makes), or I'd have been totally *******.

At the moment, one could successfully argue that the only safe and reliable way to keep digital copies of CDs that one has already paid for is by ripping your own copies and running iTunes with the Genius, iCloud, and iMatch functions turned off. And not allowing iTunes to reorganize the music directory or download artwork (I've gotten some really whacked "art" for some albums out of the iTunes database). If you're interested in privacy, turning off all the outside connections is a pretty good idea anyway.

I'll say it again: iTunes is rapidly becoming more and more like the Adobe products. It's nearly impossible to turn off Adobe's "automatic" updates, but I would never install a major upgrade without waiting a while, and doing a lot of reading to find out what's likely to go wrong first. Long ago, it was possible to just let AutoUpdate safely install anything Apple sent out, but that time is long past at this point. And since I still have my 1st Gen iPod stored away on a shelf here, I can say that the majority of the problems I've encountered over the years have been with the **** iTunes software, not the various iPod or iDock hardware we've owned.

I have a 4s and downloaded the software update. I have random songs that disappear from many of my albums, usually the same songs. I can sync my phone and the songs don't reappear, but if I click on the artists and then click the "apply" button, the songs magically reappear. The next time I sync my phone they disappear again and I have to go in and manually put them back in by clicking on the artist. It's very time consuming and frustrating and I don't want to sync my phone because I don't want to go through this all the time. Any suggestions?!! I tried unselecting some of my playlists to see if space is an issue. We'll see if that helps but I doubt it! This has happened so many times. Tonight I had to click on 30 artists to get their songs back. Also, new songs purchased from iTunes don't appear on my phone with a sync. I have to click on the artist to get them. I'm a newbie so don't know if I'm doing something wrong.