Songs Disappearing from iTunes

I can give another Could it be: Robert Tear is dead, Thomas Allen isn't. But it seems unlikely that any agreement with a PRS (Performing Rights Society) would be that elaborate. And guess what? This morning Robert Tear's songs have reappeared! So now I'm wondering if there could be a bug in the file system, affecting items with a more-than-average amount of metadata?

@turingtest2: Thank you for your assurances about Apple. There are 28 pages of people talking about vanishing songs in this thread, and personally I hardly use the keyboard in iTunes, only in the search box. Yesterday I had to use Cmd-I to fix an empty column after importing a brand new CD (which will now go to Oxfam), but otherwise I just use the trackpad.

And didn't someone report a Genius Bar or phone call in which an Apple guy admitted the problem but said they've no idea why it's happening? That seems credible, iTunes must be a huge kluge of chopped & changed code by now.

Since yesterday I have unchecked Keep iTunes Media organized. Everything is kept in the default built-in SSD. Even the reduced set for the iPad is just a copied selection from ~Music/iTunes/iTunes Media, and that was a one-off excercise last year.

And I have a Time Capsule; with Time Machine it's a great automatic backup mechanism. I'm glad I didn't rush into using it yesterday. I've no idea how many of the 6635 songs had exclamation marks then, with TC I was completely unfazed and just went to this forum.

And btw, I instantly opted out of Match last year, when I found it downgrading from 256kbps to 128.

DW32

Why don't you use dropbox to backup your music? Hope you find this useful.

Cheers!

My library is a little larger than a free dropbox account would support. While for small libraries it might be OK to put the generally unchanging meida in a dropbox I suspect that it would not be a good idea to have the live database in a dropbox folder. The database is updated everytime you play a track which could result in a lot of traffic to the dropbox, and might potentially lock the database as iTunes is trying to update it.

tt2

Ok, so what are you planning on doing now?

macandmercedes wrote:

Ok, so what are you planning on doing now?

As given a few posts earlier in the thread... 😉

I'm obviously being too subtle with the links. I use a folder cloning tool called SyncToy as described here: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2682

You can find a similar tool, e.g. CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper!, for Macs.

Or you can use 3rd party tools to burn backups to DVDs.

In a nutshell you need to copy your entire iTunes folder somewhere else, then if the original dies you can restore the copy. If the copy dies just make a new one. Tools help streamline the process of updating the backup.

tt2

This OSX utility can fix the missing exclamation mark problem, provided the songs still exist in the original locations.

https://github.com/jbaumbach/TuneDoctor

Hope this helps.

JB

lavamantis wrote:

This OSX utility can fix the missing exclamation mark problem, provided the songs still exist in the original locations.

Software free solution: Close iTunes, enable/wake-up external/network drive, start iTunes. No more exclamation marks.

tt2

turingtest2 wrote:

lavamantis wrote:

This OSX utility can fix the missing exclamation mark problem, provided the songs still exist in the original locations.

Software free solution: Close iTunes, enable/wake-up external/network drive, start iTunes. No more exclamation marks.

tt2

and it really is that simple?

Zounds! 😝

Many thanks to tt2...you've been a great help on these issues. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

The frustrating thing is all the hoops that have to be jumped through to get basic functionality from such a popular software product and the expertise needed to figure out problems and workarounds.

I've now got a Zune but haven't done anything with it. I've read mixed reviews of the Zune music management software. Has anyone used a management product called MusicBee? That seems to get the best reviews for overall simplicity and functionality. Right now, my plan is to try to salvage my music collection, move it to MusicBee, and use my new Zune player.

I mentioned before that all of my music library appears to be almost intact with three problems....

First, all my ripped music had vanished but I was able to restore how it's listed in the library with tt2's help. Thanks again.

Second, all of my iTunes Store purchases have been downloaded twice. I have no idea how that happened but I assume I'll have to manually delete about 3,000 songs.

Third, I had a fair number of video clips. Some were music videos along with a couple of SNL bits I downloaded from the iTunes Store. Except for the two SNL episodes, all of the purchased and ripped videos are gone. The SNL episodes show up in the "TV Shows" listing in the iTunes library but there is nothing in the "Movies" category where most of the videos used to be. They are gone from the library listing and from my hard drive.

Chris CA wrote:

and it really is that simple?

Zounds! 😝

If nothing has moved, yes. Once iTunes has noticed that a drive isn't accessible it seems to treat all the files as AWOL until given reason to check again. Double-clicking a song may make it check and then play that track, but it will skip others that it has "decided" are missing. Close iTunes and restart and it assumes everything is where it should be until circumstances reveal otherwise. Granted most of my desructive testing takes place on Windows but I'm fairly sure iTunes for Mac behaves the same in this respect.

Of course if the files have been moved, that's a whole different ball game. Usually moving files back where they came from, closing and opening iTunes will work, otherwise for Windows users I have a script for remapping the broken links to the new paths.

tt2

QuoteNotes wrote:

Many thanks to tt2...you've been a great help on these issues. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

The frustrating thing is all the hoops that have to be jumped through to get basic functionality from such a popular software product and the expertise needed to figure out problems and workarounds.

I've now got a Zune but haven't done anything with it. I've read mixed reviews of the Zune music management software. Has anyone used a management product called MusicBee? That seems to get the best reviews for overall simplicity and functionality. Right now, my plan is to try to salvage my music collection, move it to MusicBee, and use my new Zune player.

I mentioned before that all of my music library appears to be almost intact with three problems....

First, all my ripped music had vanished but I was able to restore how it's listed in the library with tt2's help. Thanks again.

You're welcome. 🙂

Second, all of my iTunes Store purchases have been downloaded twice. I have no idea how that happened but I assume I'll have to manually delete about 3,000 songs.

See this thread for background on why iTunes can end up with duplicates and how they can be systematically removed. The script there is for Windows users and the "show duplicates" menus have moved around in iTunes 11, but the advice on clearing recently made duplicates should still hold.

Third, I had a fair number of video clips. Some were music videos along with a couple of SNL bits I downloaded from the iTunes Store. Except for the two SNL episodes, all of the purchased and ripped videos are gone. The SNL episodes show up in the "TV Shows" listing in the iTunes library but there is nothing in the "Movies" category where most of the videos used to be. They are gone from the library listing and from my hard drive.

Hard to say why that might be the case. Did you perhaps move the movies to another drive at some point to free up space? Depending upon exactly when the purchases were made, and if that content is still available in the store, you should be able to download those again.

tt2

I'll check out the duplicates thread. Thanks.

No, I didn't move anything. The files appear to have just vanished. I had dozens of 2-3 minute video clips I had accumulated that are all gone. I'm not too concerned about them. I think I'll stick with just music files and move to the Zune.

No worries. Just in case it helps to avoid problems later I suggest a read of my post on Getting iTunes & Windows Media Player to play nicely.

If you reimported the media folder at some point the missing clips could be in the Home Videos section of the iTunes Library.

tt2

I am now trying to move my itunes music ot a new computer and its a headache to say the least. It will move the folders but not what is in the folder. What I hate is the song could be missing and I won't know until I actually click on the title. The song is on the old computer in the folder. WHY won't the folder with said contents MOVE to the new computer?