Level 1

22 points

Songs Disappearing from iTunes

I've seen other threads on this marked as answered, but they clearly were not based on the posts in them. At first I thought I was going crazy, or maybe had lost some music when I transferred from my old machine to my new one, but now I have songs I know I bought since moving to the new machine that have disappeared. Not just randomly missing songs, but entire missing albums too. Of course, since backing up my music consisted of simply copying the iTunes folder to an external drive (admittedly lazy way, sure) it happily overwrite the folder as I told it to and thus my backups are missing the songs too. This is complete crap, and is NOT answered as the other threads claim. Even if support allows me to re-download everything (at this point, I couldn't even tell you for sure what I am missing since I don't recall everything I've bought) what stops this from happening in the future? If my hard earned money is just going to vaporize off my hard drive at random when I am trying to play by the rules and be legal, give me one good reason not to just save that money and just start pirating everything? Because as much as I don't like pirating, I don't like buying an entire CD for one good song even less, and I like having stuff I bought simply disappear even less than that.

What is the fix for this problem? If Apple lets me redownload everything, where is the proof this won't happen again? I NEED to have a legitimate answer to this question or you and the music industry can kiss my money goodbye. Limewire will be my new music source.

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Feb 11, 2009 8:34 AM

633 replies

Feb 20, 2017 5:09 AM in response to BajaHairless

an original back-up to work from if my other work fails. These days, when I buy from Amazon, they give me a digital copy as well as sending me the physical CD.

i Wish you luck as you work through this.

Kadylak

Level 1

4 points

Mar 10, 2017 8:35 PM in response to gizmonic

I too just started experiencing this phenomenon of iTunes deleting tracks from within iTunes and off my computer's hard disk bypassing even the Recycle bin. I went to a file under a certain Genre and right-clicked Open in Explorer to see that it was there. I then went to play it and it disappeared! I first noticed this when I clicked shuffle play and songs didn't start playing, it was like going through songs, almost starting a millisecond in and then removing it and then going on to the next, continually removing the songs!

And no, restoring from a backup is not a solution. What is to say it won't happen again, and I shouldn't have be doing this in the first place if Apple is messing around with my songs that I purchased with hard-earned cash.

Kadylak

Level 1

4 points

Mar 13, 2017 10:24 AM in response to gizmonic

I may have stumbled onto what part of what may be going on here. It seems Apple has decided they will overwrite my change of Genre of each (m4p) song. For some reason it's checking their servers, and if it doesn't match the Genre it has the gall to rename the genre. If I go to my purchased songs that aren't in my library I have seen some of them appear there. I don't want to have to redownload each and every song and then go back and change each and every genre to my preference, since that's how I've setup my playlists.

Jul 9, 2017 5:24 AM in response to gizmonic

Ive had this problem recently and was about to raise some serious arguments to itunes and apple but i looked through my account and found something odd. in our profiles we can hide music but for me i know i didn't tell itunes to hide any song. but to get to here you need the desktop version of itunes and the menu bar on your itunes, select Account and just login like you would if you haven't already and then scroll to View my account. once the page loads up look for the section Itunes in the cloud and you will see in this section called hidden purchases. just hit manage to the far right of it and select your song that have been hidden by clicking the Unhide button below the song of choice. i hope this helps you guys from your song frustration.

Wedger1

Level 1

4 points

Jul 9, 2017 9:41 AM in response to gizmonic

I bought plenty of songs and albums and all were fine until my free 3 month Apple Music finished then a lot of stuff has gone or only two or three left on a album, don't know if this is the case for anyone else out there ? Can I get them back or do I have to join Apple Music again to recover them ? Cheers .

Jul 25, 2017 10:36 PM in response to Limnos

I've noticed that some albums on the iTunes Store are missing the first song off of an album. Two examples of which are Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye and To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar. Also I noticed that an album I purchased a song off of a few years back is completely missing from the iTunes Store completely. I'm not sure what's going on but I'm pretty sure it's on Apple's end not us the users.

Jul 31, 2017 8:34 AM in response to gizmonic

I know it's over 8 years later, but I'm still seeing songs, albums, artists disappearing from my library. Seems to be at random. Also, is there anyway to go back to an older version of the itunes interface as a bunch of features have disappeared too.

Limnos

Level 10

427,253 points

Feb 11, 2009 10:35 AM in response to gizmonic

Well, after filtering through the 90% of other stuff my basic question is, are the files disappearing from itunes or the whole computer? I have never seen anybody comment on files vanishing off iTunes. Links breaking, yes.

If files are vanishing off your computer then you have a more serious issue than just iTunes. Is there evidence of other files vanishing?

pixigirl

Level 1

0 points

Feb 11, 2009 10:51 AM in response to gizmonic

Gizmonic: I, too, have had all my "purchases" disapper except for downloads from the last month and first month. 8 months of downloads in between have disappeared. How do I get them back? I paid for them! I have email receipts and credit card receipts to prove I purchased these albums. what do I do?

gizmonic Author

Level 1

22 points

Feb 11, 2009 11:28 AM in response to Limnos

No other files are missing. Just some songs and albums from itunes. And yes, the files are gone. If just the file was missing the itunes music list would have the red exclamation point by the file name. But, in this case, they are completely gone, not just the files, but the listing as well, meaning something in itunes deleted them entirely. I suppose it could be possible that I somehow might have accidently hit delete and then yes, and then remove from my computer and all that for a song or two (highly unlikely, but, I suppose possible). It is NOT likely that I would do this for whole albums.

This is not a case of a bad hard drive or something in OS X or whatnot. ITunes itself knows the files are completely gone, not just "missing" since I don't even have the red ! next to the names. And despite admitting it may be possible to accidently delete them, personally, I never delete music from ITunes. If I get tired of something, since I paid for it, I merely uncheck the playlist checkbox.

And while you state that you have not seen anyone else mention this, I found this forum searching google for missing songs and found other threads in this very forum saying exactly the same thing I am. They were closed as answered despite multiple people saying that they were having the problem and why was it marked as answered when it clearly wasn't? A little searching and you too can find these threads I am sure.

This is a real problem, not user error. I can't imagine with the volume of posts I've read that this is simply something with me alone, or bad hardware, or even an accidental delete here and there. There is more to it than that.

Something is up, and I am not sure what. I know Apple went through and deleted purchased music that had been hacked with JHymn or whatever back in the day? (Not 100% sure as I didn't use ITunes then, just remember friends talking about it.) Maybe this is something similar, only gone awry and deleting valid songs?

I don't know. I just know that ITunes is losing my music. Not just the files alone, but the entire song is gone as if it had never existed.

I just what to know what's up and why it happened and what they are doing to fix it (assuming it's not already fixed in the latest release).

Mar 2, 2009 12:51 PM in response to gizmonic

I've got the same problem as Gizmonic - MP3 files and their folders are vanishing from my iTunes library. The files affected seem to be random.

It's happened now and with Mac OS 10.4.x and earlier version of iTunes.

EDIT: So it's clear - it's the MP3 files themselves that are vanishing, as well as their entries in iTunes. Playlists seem unaffected.

- Richard

Message was edited by: rcosgrove

Mar 3, 2009 9:57 PM in response to pixigirl

This is happening to me too. Random songs disappearing from iTunes. Help!

Mar 4, 2009 1:04 AM in response to gizmonic

I'm having a similar problem. When I opened up iTunes last night, my entire music library had been wiped. Luckily, the files are still in My Music folder like they should be, but I honestly don't want to have to go about adding all my playlists and stuff again. Does ANYONE have an answer for this?

Mar 4, 2009 5:21 AM in response to gizmonic

I am having a similar problem.
All my podcasts are disappearing along with any songs I add in. I have noticed this only happens when restarting my system. I always empty my recycling bin before logging off and when I log back in there are itunes backup files in my recycling bin!
The files are:
iTunes Library Extras
iTunes Genius

Both are database files.
I try restoring the files to no avail.
I look in my iTunes My Music folder and all my downloads are missing.
I am ready to start copying them over to another location every time so I don't loose my information that I've spent time in the slow iTunes Store for!

Mar 4, 2009 12:27 PM in response to gizmonic

I am not only losing songs, albums, and audiobooks from my music library but I have also lost all of my playlists. Since this is such a common problem, is there an software expert from Apple involved in this discussion?

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Songs Disappearing from iTunes