Songs Disappearing from iTunes

I've been searching like mad for an answer to this, too.

Let me be clear. This is not user error. Here's what's going on:

For no reason that I can determine, iTunes encounters "dead" tracks, i.e., songs that are in my library (imported by me), both AAC and MP3. I go to the directory where they're supposed to be, and they're gone. Completely missing original file. In my case, they songs are staying in the library, but the originals are missing.

My library is in the /Users/Shared directory, and the whole iTunes directory is intact, and the right pointers to the music library are in preferences, and I let iTunes keep the folder organized. I have no idea what I've lost. I remember that my library used to be close to 60 gb in size, and right now I'm down to about 48 gb.

This is latest iTunes 8 on up-to-date Leopard system.

I checked my iTunes library last night - I have over 80 album playlists which are empty: no tracks in the playlists and no files on my hard drive. And some of these tracks were ones I listened to within the last 1-2 months.

@Poulsboguy
Since this is such a common problem, is there an software expert from Apple involved in this discussion?
BWAH-HA-HA! Do they ever bother to visit these forums? Only answers I've gotten here are from fellow Mac users.

I've read through these posts and cannot find a clear answer to my problem. Yesterday, I had over 1000 songs in my Library with dozens of different playlists. I went to the Apple Store to purchase some songs. I found one song, purchased it, had to log in with Apple ID and approve the $0.99 purchase. I was asked to update my iTunes account and had to agree to new Terms, etc. After this purchase, I then went back to the iTunes store and found an entire album I wanted to purchase for $7.99. At the time, I had iMovie open as well. After making these purchases, I went back to iMovie. For some reason, it unexpectedly quit. I chose to quit iTunes as well and restart my MacBook. After restarting, I opened iTunes and my original 1000+ songs were MISSING from my library. The only songs in the library were the 13 from the album I purchased earlier. Even the single song I purchased just minutes before the new album was gone. Does ANYBODY have a solution? While reading these various posts, I looked for my library file and found:
Macintosh HD/Users/<MyAccount>/Music/iTunes/
Inside the iTunes folder, there is a file called iTunes Library and it says it was created when I opened iTunes after restarting my laptop & found my songs missing. Yet, when I look in the iTunes Music folder that is located in this iTunes folder mentioned above, there are 57 folders in it with what appears to be all of my songs/ albums from before. I even did a "Get Info" on my Music folder that is inside my Home Directory and it says it is 9.7 GB in size. That would indicate that the music is still there, but why cannot I not see the 1000+ songs and playlists that were there yesterday? How do I get them all back? Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

***?! This problem has been around for at least 4 years, and there are is no answer? That is ridiculous. Why hasn't Apple addressed this? It seems that whenever I go to listen to an album that I haven't heard in awhile I will find that a few random songs are missing from the album. I'm afraid of how much music I have lost. Is there a solution? If not, does anyone have recommendations for a better program to use that will not destroy money+hundreds-of-hours worth of music uploading? I usually love Apple, but this really peeves me because I am an audiophile and do not know what to do about this problem

Getting the songs back in iTunes is easy, just go File -> Add to Library... and select your iTunes Music folder.

You can also drag-and-drop MP3 files into playlists. They'll get added to your iTunes library and whatever playlist you've dropped them into.

But the point remains that this kind of crap shouldn't be happening.

I know one problem! If you kill a playlist which contains songs they are deleted forever from the main library and your hard disc, this never happened in the really old versions, to kill a playlist you have to delete the songs first then kill the empty folder off - how stupid is that!

That has only happened to me when I've used Apple-Ctrl-Shift+backspace to delete a playlist.

I have the very same problem. All songs are listed in itunes, but when I try to play them, I get the exclamation mark and it says that the original file cannot be located. It is nowhere to be found on my hard drive. Gone. How did this happen. Anyone knows?

I am experiencing the same thing described by others here. I've been ripping CD tracks to my hard drive so that I can get rid of my wall of jewel cases. But MP3 tracks I created randomly disappear. Not whole albums, but a song here or there.

I've tried locating the song, to see if the iTunes entry simply got un-linked to the file in the iTunes Music Folder, but that's not the issue. The songs are no longer on my drive.

It seems to be mostly, but not completely, the more-recently-added songs that are getting dropped. I'm dropping about 5-10 songs a day. HELP!

Does anyone know what could be causing it?

One bit of info that may have some impact is that I have changed the default location of my iTunes Music Folder to an external hard drive (connected through a Firewire 800 cable). But I'm not sure why that would have any impact.

PLEASE HELP. I will lose my mind if my iTunes continues to randomly delete songs.

Hi there,

Now I'll be the first to admit that I am not tech savvy ... but I thought I was doing pretty well until I came across this problem too.

I had a whole bunch of songs that I'd downloaded from iTunes, and others that I've uploaded from CDs and even though they appear in my iTunes library if I try to play them it says that the song can't be located. They're still on my iPod though.

What the ****?? It's so frustrating! I know that I have not deleted any files or moved anything so why is this happening? And, more importantly, how can I fix it?

HELP!! 🙂

Suzanna

Hi

Just another "me too" maybe, but ...

As many indicate I also loose songs / albums in iTunes. I used to have my iTunes lib residing on an external 500GB USB drive, but kept loosing a lot. I suspected I did screw up things myself, it was a major hassle...

So I decided to go for a NAS solution. I`ve built an FreeBSD 7.1R server based on a old Intel server MB. It works very well (5.5TB effective storage with RAID 60). I NFS export a 1.5TB partition (where I keep the iTunes lib) from this server to the Mac`s, and it works like a charm. Except I still occationally loose whole albums. As I have ripped my complete CD collection (ca 750 albums) and bought some on iTunes too, the library is currently 425GB. So I began suspect iTunes had an issue with large DB sizes and/or had serious bug(s). I decided to (NFS) export my music lib readonly from the server. So now I do not loose the actual AAC or MP3 files any more, but they still disappear from the playlists/iTunes DB.

So, once in while (every time I play some albums actually), I`ll have to "readd" the songs to the Itunes lib. It works ok, but next time around it is another album missing, and so on ... frusterating.

I would really like to see Apple opening the iTunes code to the open source community, or at least fix the bugs 😉

sms

My iTunes 8 has a persistent problem with songs disappearing from my playlists. All my music (80GB of mp3's) is stored on a external USB drive, organised by folders of A-Z, with artists in these and albums in the artists folders.
(I do not allow iTunes to manage my music - I once lost 50GB of songs when I did that.)
My iPhone is only 16GB, so I have created a 14GB 'iPhone' playlist to sync it. If I open iTunes without the external drive connected, it randomly deletes songs from the iPhone playlist, anywhere from 1 - 5GB just vanish. There is no pattern of what goes missing and I am not trying to play them in iTunes when they go missing.
I am forever having to re-import the backups of my playlist.
iTunes 8 is also incredibly slow - it can take up to 25 seconds to respond to any mouse click. Its not the machine, I also have a quad core machine with 8GB of RAM and that runs iTunes at the same (lack of) speed.

There doesn't seem to be any pattern to this problem. Some are losing songs purchased from Apple. Some lose everything. Most people aren't aware how many they've lost. When I tried to sync yesterday it told me that 22 songs could not be copied because the file is missing. When iTunes was finished it allowed me to click to see what files it was talking about. They were all from one double album that I had ripped a year ago, a few from disc 1 and a few from disc 2. I have a time capsule so I went back and restored the whole album and told it to overwrite all the songs. Same songs were missing even though they were in the folder I restored from. I'm calling Apple when I have time and I will repost with what I find out, but this is so unacceptable its not even funny. The only detail about the songs that I can share is that they were ripped in AAC format, but it does not appear that that matters.

I posted earlier and need to correct one thing....I didn't go back far enough in my Time Machine. I had to go back over 4 months ago to find the folder with the missing tracks in it. So, the mystery deepens. These songs have been gone for all this time and I only found out about it because of that message iTunes gave me stating it could not copy certain songs over to my iPod because they were missing. Well, I wasn't even trying to copy those songs over AND, turns out, they were not missing on my iPod. So, I am only more confused. And I don't ever go into my music folder, so there is no way I deleted these things myself.

I said previously that I may call Apple, but I don't want to waste my time with Tier 1 help not knowing anything about this issue. I am going to go back to that time period on my Time Machine and see if I can tell if the size of my music folder shrank at some point because I have no idea if more songs than the 22 that were pointed out by iTunes are gone. This stinks!