Songs Disappearing from iTunes

Just adding my voice to the chorus.

My husband and I keep a shared iTunes library on a ReadyNAS Duo, and although it appears to work fine most of the time, we've been running into a couple of annoying problems. I'm not sure if they're related or not.

1) The disappearing song problem. Like others here, we've been encountering songs that we know we have, but that have disappeared from the iTunes library. So far, all of them have still been in the iTunes Music folder, so we have to go back and add them to the library manually. This works great if you remember everything that you've downloaded or added recently, but if you're like me and you have a terrible memory, you don't even REMEMBER which songs you're missing! There appears to be no rhyme or reason to which songs go missing, except for that most of them seem to have been added fairly recently.

2) We are also getting an "iTunes Library Could Not Be Saved" error (sometimes it's 13001, sometimes it's 13005). We had been just ignoring it, because it didn't seem to actually have any effect on the library (things would still be saved and available the next time we opened iTunes), but now I'm thinking perhaps they're related.

Just my two cents. I'd love to hear if anyone has found solutions to either problem.

gbuell,

The problem with doing this is that I end up with a bunch of duplicates! Any suggestions for how to do this without adding duplicates?

i have this problem too but my whole library gets wiped out. it happens like everyday to the point where i stop putting my music back. i've put all my music,applications,videos back like 10 to 15 times already and its really annoying to have to do that because u have to delete the doulbes and put artwork that took forever to get back, its BS and its been like this for months. its stupid for me to put all my stuff back when at the end of the night its all gone.

my songs are starting to disappear -- very scary to watch!

The songs are no longer in my itunes library -- I can't add them back. They're missing!

And -0- they're missing by ARTIST. All songs by certain artists are missing, regardless of which CD they come from. All folders for that particular artist are empty.

Help! Who can I ask for help? We don't seem to have the answers here on this forum, or other online forums for that matter either. Anyone have a phone number to call? Or a protest list to add my name to? This is ridiculous!

I join many others in the mystery of disappearing songs. The titles remain in my play list and the songs remain on my iPhone but the music file in the itunes library is missing. The album folder is still there and the iTunes database still shows the file but the file is gone. It seems to be every song I purchased from the iTunes store. This is very disconcerting especially since you just can't go redownload them.

I would like to know if there is a way to copy the missing songs from my iPhone back to the iTunes library. I tried the "File Transfer Puchases from Iphone" suggestions but no files were transfered.
It worries me that the only files disappearing are the ones I purchased through iTunes.

In trying to resolve this mystery I did discover that my Time Machine setup was backing up the database but not the actual songs. I also found from another thread that if Time Machine is backing up to the same disk as your music files this could cause the missing songs problem. I use an external 2GB drive for Time Machine backups and to store my music files but this reason for having files disappear is hardly believable since Time Machine would have to somehow descriminate and only delete iTunes purchased songs...and why would Time Machine be capable of deleting files anyway. Something more interesting is going on.

Looking for ideas on how to get my songs off of my iPhone 3 and back into the iTunes librayr. In the mean time, no more iTunes purchases from me.

Back in iTunes 7 the problem began hitting me-- and some additional songs where the song is listed, the track has the size and type, but no longer plays. Now under iTunes 8 we can add songs that suddenly stop in mid song, songs duplicating themselves, so one copy of one CD with nine tracks suddenly has eight tracks like before but three to six copies of one song-- but if you delete ANY of that one song, all the copies vanish.

At this point I have almost given up on straightening out the library, it seems randomly sorted and saved, but I would like the program to quit killing songs.

Here is a possibly related issue that I am having:

Lately several of my albums on iTunes have stopped playing, and the artwork has disappeared. The album info is still in my iTunes library, so at first I thought the album artwork was just getting zapped. But if I click on play on any song in these albums, simply nothing happens. It just will not play.

I dragged some of the files from iTunes onto the desktop, and tried playing them on another audio player, but nothing happened. So apparently the files are somehow getting damaged.

The files are still visible in my library (I keep my iTunes library on an external hard drive), but the icon preview next the the song does not show the cover art, as it does on unaffected albums.

The only thing these albums have in common, strangely, is that the artists all start with A (Andre Bourgeois, Andres Segovia, Anouar Brahem, Anthony Braxton, and Antonio Carlos Jobim). The files are all MPEG-4 audio files, except for one song, which is an MP3.

All the tracks were burned from store bought CDs, and played fine on iTunes for months, until one day they didn't.

Now occasionally I click on an album in iTunes, and the artwork just disappears, and the album no longer plays. Other albums play without problem, and display the correct artwork.

I am using the most current version of iTunes, my software is up to date, and I have tried repairing the permissions on my hard drive.

Can someone shed any light on this bizarre and perplexing issue, before my iTunes library disappears into the Twilight Zone? Thanks!

The easiest way to avoid the duplicates is simply to delete everything from iTunes (and make sure to select the option to KEEP FILES if it gives you a choice) and then reimport everything. That'll start you from scratch, no dupes.

Happening to me as well - very frustrating!!! Has Apple addressed this anywhere?? Just adding to the chorus to wake them up...

I would hope that someone or "someones" are working behind the scenes, but for many of the people in the business they have one standard-- does it work with the newest machines? This happens with software from outside the machine makers, too, such as Final Draft deciding they don't really NEED to fully support Mac OS 10.4.11 because "Apple is pushing 10.5" and the mere fact that the single largest group of their users are using OS 10.4.11 doesn't seem to bother them.

I wonder if the problem may be generation gap related, with "buy something new" being in the back of the mind of the people who are supposed to look at it.

I was told that "you're the only one with that problem."

That was at the genius bar, and the speaker must not have really been a genius, because seven of the sixteen people there had partial song disappearances, where it only plays for one minute fifteen seconds of a four minute play time, or where the whole song vanished.

Does Apple care?

I have a similar problem. In fact, I just assumed it was my old MacBook being all slow and old that caused the problem and yesterday I upgraded to a MacBook Pro, and now I have the same problem still, so I'm at a loss.

Here's the situation, as specific as I can be:

- 500 GB NAS drive
- iTunes library itself resides locally
- iTunes music folder is on the NAS
- Actual files are NOT missing on the drive
- iTunes seems to randomly "forget" where to look for (usually) whole albums, or occasionally specific songs. For example, when I loaded my new library, it still has the songs present, but every single album and song by "...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead" went missing, but the artists that immediately preceded and followed that artist were intact.
- "Updating" the library does not fix it, or if it does, it will fix some files and then lose others
- I noticed this happening the most when my library grew to around 20,000 files

I suspect that something is going missing in the .xml file? It looks like it's just losing the path to the songs. Any one else experience this?

This is definitely a problem. I noticed my iTunes library was 97 gigs and could have sworn the files filled 330 or so gigs. It shows 13k songs and I could have sworn I had over 40k songs. Sure enough, entire albums were missing from the database. I tried a few things and here's what I have...

I have an iMac from the March 2009 refresh, running 10.5.8, Itunes 8.

iTunes is checked to copy files to my library AND keep it organized.

I own the physical CDs of the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, 1986 and 2004 versions. They disappeared from the database. I tried to re-add them. It WON'T. It just sits there like I didn't even do anything.

I digitally bought and downloaded the Les Miserables Complete edition, and converted to MP3. My AAC files remain in the playlist. The MP3 files are on the drive but disappeared from the playlist. They won't import either. Tried renaming the AAC version of the album to "[AAC] Les Mis..." so that the MP3 tags would contain a different album name string. Still won't import.

Tried deleting my entire iTunes library, keeping the files. Reboot. Re-added the iTunes Music folder. Neither Phantom nor Les Mis was added. Still can't import them. It allows me to run the command and select the folder, and hit OK, and then it just... doesn't do it.

There are ~250 gigs of music files in my iTunes Music folder. So basically there are around ~150 gigs on the drive but not in the iTunes master playlist, and ~80 gigs just gone, bahleeted, etc. I can't even remember most of what is missing, though the majority of my collection still exists in CD form in my closet. I'd really, REALLY rather not re-rip all but obviously that's gonna have to happen for a lot of it. I'm not sure yet whether any of my AAC files have disappeared. Can't seem to find any that have, neither Protected nor Purchased/Plus.

This is a RIDICULOUS bug. It's almost as bad as the folder behavior when Mac OS X overwrites on a folder copy... Apple, you guys NEED to fix this. Don't make me go back to Windows. For some reason when they do this stuff, it works perfectly every time. And that's not something they're known for.

EDIT: Just to make sure I don't get useless replies: I have over 100GB free drive space, and I'm not running anything particularly unusual.

Update. I "got info" on the files that were out of iTunes and they are showing "Everyone: No Access" in permissions. I tried repairing permissions on the disk with Disk Utility but it didn't fix them.

WHAT THE HECK!!!!

This is the dumbest OS bug I think I've ever heard of, EVER. Why in the world would anyone EVER knowingly turn off permissions to their own files for themselves? This is not a network server or any of that crap, just one guy with one computer and everything is supposed to just work, period.

So basically my files are there but they might as well be long gone. I googled for the problem and there are tutorials about "chmod this and that", well I'm not a freaking technical person that's why I bought a Mac, to have a turn key computer that works. Plus like I have time to chmod thousands of mp3 files, literally over a hundred gigs of them. I have work to do. Again, that's why I paid extra for what was supposed to be a "turn key" computer.

Basically if Apple can't find a quick, easy, direct solution for this before Windows 7 is released, I'll be leaving and never switching back. My iMac can run Windows just fine until I get around to buying a new box, and then I can ebay off my Mac and recoup some of the artificially high price. This is absolutely unacceptable performance for an operating system or application.

I didn't know you can even chmod mp3s on your local machine. On a server, that's a different issue, but someone could have attacked you with a script or something to that effect. This happened to a wordpress site I used - someone ran a script on it and changed all the permissions. But that was for web files.

For what it's worth I found out that a major issue affecting my songs were that my fiancee's Windows machine was going around and truncating all my song files, causing a great deal of them to be "lost" in the master database. This only affected about 10% of my overall problem, but it was still annoying.

You should be able to batch-edit the permissions I assume using an ftp agent. Cyberduck is a free one I use a lot. All you do is get the properties/info of whatever files, or even a folder and have it apply changes recursively throughout.

I'm not a tech savvy person either though, so I could be talking out of my arse. Worth a shot though