The discussion seems to have shifted a bit, and this will probably be burried before long. Maybe others have replied with something similar before, but here goes. Despite the fact that, like most of you I'm sure, I'm still ANGRY about this problem, I seem to have discovered a somewhat tedious, but so far effective sloppy fix. (i would almost say it's a kind of " SOLUTION to the problem of iTunes deleting music files " for seo, purposes.)
Long story short, I went to Preferences and disabled the option to let iTunes manage it's media folder. I stated earlier that i would try this and since then, i haven't had problems so far, so i decided to share.
For those who don't know how:
- open Preferences, on Windows it's under "Edit" on a Mac (if i remember right) it's under that little apple-shaped icon in the upper left corner when you have the itunes window selected (if it's not there, there are pleanty of other guides to tell you where, or you can just hover over menus until it shows up).
- In any case, open Preferences, go to the "Advanced" tab, and under the "iTunes media folder location" area are two check boxes.
- The first box is "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" with a bit of a description underneath (Sorry, this is from the windows side, but it's usually similar between the two). UNcheck this box.
Some issues with this method:
Since unchecking this box, I haven't had any problems with iTunes DELETING music files (granted, i didn't have any problems before now, either). If you uncheck this box, but still keep the option for iTunes to "copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library" it will create folders and such when you add new things, but it will not adjust this when you change something about the song data. Because of this, if you change the title, artist, or album, it may have problems FINDING the file again. If you run into this, just choose the option to "Locate" the file when you try to play or "get info" on the song and find it int he file system on your computer. This would be the "tedious" bit I mentioned earlier. It's a pain in the butt, but i think better than the alternative.
Since then, if i want to change the information about a song after it's added to itunes, i then have to somehow manually re-locate or move the file to it's new expected place so iTunes can find it. but i've also found out how to manage song information from Windows Explorer (you can even manage several files at once), and you may be able to find it in Finder as well. The benefit of this is manipulating all the info about a song before importing it so that it gets coppied into the right place and you don't have to worry about it once it's imported. It was primarily in this manual file management that i noticed the following.
Why I think this works:
I know the problem has been around for at least a year now. It seemed to happen to me after an update or two. but my best hypothesis is that at least one cause is a clash of file managing, more specifically, file naming. overall, Apple tends to be much more forgiving with it's file names than Windows; that is, it allows longer file names with a wider variety of permited characters. and, I believe, iTunes often has even more lax naming conventions than OSX.
I've noticed that recently, my windows 7 has been much less forgiving in the file-name department, not allowing various punctuation marks and such that it's used to. and i've found several old files who's names have been truncated. There have also been issues in the past with non-roman characters (that is, asian, cyrilic (russian-ish), greek, mathematical symbols, etc.) turning into poorly interpreted computer giberish. I've also fond in the past, that not only the file name matters, when it comes to length, but also the length of the file path (that is, the names of all the files you go through to get to the file you want).
Because of this, many of my song and artist names seem to have been suddenly changed. Truncated, punctuation marks turned to underscores, spaces removed, and non-roman characters tranlated to gunk... and then, becouse gunk is usually longer, truncated. iTunes seems to have tried to cope with this, but failed, because it's looking for exact matches to song and album titles. in some cases, i noticed the names in my itunes library were changed. in some cases, it seems to not be able to find the files. (I noticed that even after re-locating all my files, it still seems to have problems finding some of them by name because the two systems are still trying to compensate for one another in that regard.)
I believe that initially, when this suddden clash occured, iTunes tried to adjust where it could, and tossed files it thought didn't belong in it's library. I wasn't careful with the emptying of my recylce bin once, but i do remember noticing very late that one of my dumps shortly before i discovered this issue had an unusually large number of files in it-- somewhere in the hundreds or thousands, which is the number of songs i lost.
So, in conclusion, I would say this:
If you are already in this forum thread, chances are, this has already happened and there is little to be done about it now. But, a small thing you can do to minimize damage in the future is KEEP A VERY CLOSE EYE ON WHAT IS IN YOUR RECYCLE/TRASH BIN. I've started emptying mine more frequently to keep the files in it at a manageable number, making sure that i can remember that i actually meant to delete everything that is in it. I always at least CHECK THE NUMBER OF ITEMS my computer tells me that it's going to delete. If it looks high, I check out the contents. If you're paranoid about data loss, it's a pretty good habit anyway. I just got lazy with it for a while, and now look what's happened. only my other paranoid habits saved me.
