Songs Disappearing from iTunes

Are there two copies of your purchases on the drive, or are you getting a "shadow" copy with a cloudy link. It may help to sign out of the store, then close and reopen iTunes. If you still have duplicates read on...

Deduping

Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created. If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin. Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this threadfor background and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.

(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed)

Missing store content

Try iTunes Store > Quick Links > Purchased > Media Kind > Not on this computer.

tt2

This problem has been going on for years. Also you cannot put albums or audio books in a customizable order. You cannot drag and drop them as you please, if you will, like in iTunes 10.7.

OK just had this happen to me as well, I have a very well organized (manually by genre) iTunes collection which I have 2 additional backups that I keep synchronized, either manually or with Synchronize Pro.

On my MacBook Pro, which is where I usually ingest the music from CD's or purchase online, I was just setting up a new Ipod and was going to sync my entire collection from the MacBook Pro, which is only about 13GB.

I had 5 songs each from a different artist that "was not copied to the iPod, because it could not be found. Sure enough, each song was missing from the hard drive even though all the other songs from those albums were there. So somehow, 5 songs from 5 different artist were just magically deleted from my hard drive. I had suspected this from my main iTunes collection which is on a Mac Mini, but had always had other possible explanations, but I'm pretty confident that some odd iTunes or OS X behavior deleted these songs randomly. There is a very small likelihood that I manually deleted these 5 random songs accidentally.

I have this problem too, but less severe than others describe. Mac Mini, latest OS and iTunes, all files on internal harddrives.

I have a ton of music, and when I go looking for an artist there's a chance it'll be missing from the library. I re-add it and it works fine, but other music is missing and it's hard to determine what else needs to be added until I notice. I'd guess that 10% or more is gone at the moment, and I'll probably have to delete my iTunes library and rebuild it, which ***** because I put a lot of work into the metadata (music, movies, TV shows) and I'll have to go back and fix it all.

No AVG or anything funny in my set up. Been happening for at least a year, and I'm always on the newest software.

I had other problems with iTunes as well. It's the worst part of the Apple ecosystem. I love my Mac Mini, Air, iPhones, iPads, AppleTV, but I loathe iTunes. Apple must realize how terrible it is, which makes me wonder why it hasn't been rewritten yet.

WELL.....I'm glad to see that it's not just me.

My problem, is that I downloaded many songs from itunes, planning on putting them onto my mp3, to find out that my mp3 doesn't support itunes format. I have Windows Media Player, see. Well, nobody tells you that! SO after doing much googleing, I figured out how to do it.

Here's what I did:

On my itunes acct, I right clicked on each individual song, and selected "Create MP3 version".

Then after alllll my songs were converted ((**YES, it took a long time to do each song**)), I then closed the itunes window (it makes everything run so slow), and opened my Windows Media Player.

I hit "F3" on my key board, and a window comes up that says "Add to Library", and you click on "Ok".

It then pulls files from 'outside' sources, it you will, and it also takes a while.

When it's done, you hit "close", and all the songs should now be in your Windows Media Player, and then I was able to sync them onto my MP3. It took a while, but at lease I didn't lose my $100 that I spent in itunes cards!!!!!

NOW, I noticed . . . some of the songs have disappeared form my WMP. And it seems to be the ones from itunes! ***?!?!?! So I just now went back and re-did all those time consuming steps, and they, for now, are back in my WMP.

BUT, a couple of the songs on itunes did have an exclamation point next to them and said "file could not be found". I don't understand this. I PAID for them! It's stupid, really.

So I think I'm going to do what someone else on here has done, and I'm going to get a flash drive and transfer them all to that . . . and hopefully I'll always have them!

I hope this helps anyone else out there who has had this same problem! But I still don't understand why my WMP has deleted some of the files. Anyone know why???

Careful! Moving the media folder to an external drive MAY cause missing tracks.

I moved my iTunes media folder form a macbook pro 13" to an external Seagate drive, using the method prescribed in the Support site. [http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449] The result was odd: many many tracks in the iTunes library now had the ! next to them, and the files were not on the drive. It was random: an album might be missing tracks 1, 6, and 8 with the others intact. I was able to recover the files from a backup. I passed it off as a one-off glitch. Recently I bought a 15" retina with a larger drive, so I moved the media folder back to the computer. Again I used the Apple method. Again the result was many random missing files, i.e. about 5GB of a 50GB library.

On spec, I deleted the contents of the iTunes media folder on the computer, and copied and pasted the contents of the iTunes media folder from the external drive. In iTunes, if I click on a track with the ! next to it, the player quickly finds it. To be clear, they never went missing from the iTunes library, but the files themselves went missing. So at least in my case the Apple method of moving the media folder was resulting in files going missing.

My issue seems identical to yours!

Only thing is, I woke up my laptop this afternoon, finding that iTunes was, for some reason, reconfiguring itself. Couldn't understand why. Then the window opens, and music that had been there only a few hours previously had vanished.

They're still in the folder in My Computer, but I can't drag the files over, opt to open in iTunes, or go through the Add Files To Library option. It'll let me open in Windows Media Player, but screw that for a joke.

(And yes, I am aware Windows isn't the best for running Apple stuff, but I have never had a problem before now).

If you still have the media see Empty/corrupt library after upgrade/crash.

tt2

I just had the strangest thing happen in iTunes. I was just listening to music on my iMac and I selected a song that I hadn't listened to for a while. iTunes could not find the song and asked if I wanted to locate it so I clicked on locate assuming something had just happened to the link. To my surprise when I tried to find the song on my hard drive I discovered all the files from both albums of that artist that I owned were missing. I wasn't too worried about it because I had a back up so I copied the files for the 2 missing albums back into my library from my back up and restored the links in the iTunes library.

Just to be safe I decided to compare my iTunes Music folder with my back up Music folder. I got info on both folders. I was shock when I saw the size of my iTunes Music folder was only 48GB, because my library is supposed to be over 300GB. I started looking through all the folders in the iTunes Music folder, which was organized by artist, and found most of the artist folders were empty. Some of the artist folders still had ablum folders in them but all that remainded in those folders were jpegs of cover art. All the music files were gone. I have not idea how 85% of my music library could have been deleted.

iMac, OS X 10.9, iTunes 11.1.3

It's not strange at all. iTunes has a serious problem (or multiple problems) that they either cannot figure out or don't care about. I gave up and bought a non-Apple music player. I installed MediaMonkey and imported my entire iTunes library, then got rid of iTunes. I have had no problems since. I've paid Apple THOUSANDS of dollars in iTunes downloads, multiple iPods, iPhone, iPad, etc. Their inability to resolve this problem has caused them to lose a customer, at least for now with regard to their music business.

turing, I believe I have posted them in this very topic, which is why I am still getting email reminders of replies. 🙂 I have resisted upgrading my iTunes lately because once I get something stable I have finally learned to avoid changes. In my case, the songs were deleted only during the sync process, and only if I had the "reduce bits to 128" setting turned on, and even then it would only happen the very first time I synced new songs that I had ripped. I even tried ripping the tracks and then marking them as "Read Only" which either (a) should have prevented iTunes from deleting them, or (b) at the very least I would have expected an error message. But no, the songs still got deleted on the first sync. After restoring them to my hard drive and removing them from my iPod and rerunning the sync process everything would work. So for a while my workflow would be:

1. Rip a disc

2. Update tracks / album / artwork as desired

3. Copy all of the .mp3 files to a "temp save" directory

4. Sync to my iPod to load the new music onto the device

5. Copy everything back from the "temp save" directory to restore those tracks that were deleted

6. Sync again

I thought there was a time / date issue because I discovered that my NAS device (from Netgear) was improperly modifying the clock for daylight savings time. I thought that since I was storing my music files on that device, and it was one hour in the "future", that the tracks were being deleted because iTunes refused to see them because their date/time stamp was off. I fixed my Netgear NAS device, and the problem persisted.

Next I thought I had fixed everything with an iTunes upgrade, but it turned out that the "128 bit" setting had been turned off during that process. I prefer to have that setting on so I can get more songs on my device; I didn't buy the 160GB model because I only wanted a few tunes, I wanted to have as many with me as I could. 🙂 As soon as I turned the 128bit setting back on, the problems came back.

So now I just leave that setting off, and I put fewer songs on my iPod.

I am running an iPod Classic 160GB on Windows. I could open a "file explorer" window and show the contents of one of the album folders, and I could watch the files disappear as iTunes sync'd them. I was going to offer Apple techs the ability to view my desktop to show them that, but it turns out that they can't do that on a Windows system, plus as I mentioned above, they weren't going to help without me paying because my hardware is outside of the free service window, and they don't support iTunes separately

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Actually, my issue is that I have an iPhone 5s (running IOS 7.0.2 of course) and after I transfer some songs I dumped from a CD, I move them to my iTunes Library on my computer, then drag them to my iPhone. About 12 hours later, some songs are GONE. Completly disappeared from my iPhone's music app. My computer's iTunes is up to date too. Anyone help?

-br7cobra

First piece of advice is to backup your library in a way which lets you be aware of any further issues. Are you using the option to sync lower bitrate songs to the device? This may be a factor in some instances of this behaviour.

tt2

How would I back up my library? And I don't know what you mean by lower bitrate songs, I'm sorry.

The blue text in the previous post is a link to an iTunes backup strategy.

When your device is connected on the summary tab for it there is an option that reads something like Convert higher bitrate songs to <Choice of bitrate> AAC. It is used to let you store more songs in the limited memory of a device.

tt2