Songs Disappearing from iTunes

I am very upset by Apple, especially with iTunes. So many songs deleted without my knowledge. Some are tracks I created. Some are CD's imported from my collection. Playlists destroyed. Hours and hours of content descriptions edited for my own personal enjoyment lost. What is MediaMonkey? I think I need to check it out.

;

Chronosync, I will check this out too. Unfortunately, any backups I have are not as easy to recover. I cannot believe Apple has done this.

brindlet wrote:

I am very upset by Apple, especially with iTunes. So many songs deleted without my knowledge. Some are tracks I created. Some are CD's imported from my collection. Playlists destroyed. Hours and hours of content descriptions edited for my own personal enjoyment lost.

Good thing you make regular backups.

You do make regular backups, correct?

😕

I have back ups somewhere. It will be a hassle to restore my media the way I want it organized.

Apple's software appears to be designed to function this way (losing tracks). I don't understand why.

brindlet wrote:

I have back ups somewhere. It will be a hassle to restore my media the way I want it organized.

If it was organized when you backed it up, simply restoring it will put it back organized...

Apple's software appears to be designed to function this way (losing tracks). I don't understand why.

Because it's not.

For what it's worth, way back in the earlier days of this thread I posted that for me the trigger event was checking the "reduce bitrate when syncing" option. I turned that off and haven't had the issue since. Two days ago I made a complete back-up of my iTunes folder, turned that feature back on, and synced to my iPod. Several thousand files were deleted during the process. This was the only process running on my computer, and the songs were clearly there before I started the sync because they're on the back-up.

Granted I am using an older version of iTunes, so I don't expect a lot of sympathy. 🙂 But in my case I have clearly identified the culprit, and I can recreate the issue. At some point I will upgrade to the latest version of iTunes and see if the same issue exists.

A while back I decided/theorized that missing songs were causing iTunes to fail syncing to my iPad. It would get stuck at 'waiting for changes to be applied' (that's a whole other discussion thread like this one). Things have been pretty good in that department since the last update to iTunes or iOS8 (don't know which), but yesterday a sync got stuck at 'waiting...' for about 3 minutes. I thought I was doomed and was going to have to restore everything (which takes my 128GB iPad hours). Just when I was about to cave it started going again, but iTunes decided my iPad was missing about 1400 songs and it copied them over. The iPad went from 17 to 12GBs left, so it really copied them. No duplicates. Don't know when they "disappeared", but at least the sync finished. I've still been keeping a manual backup of the songs in iTunes. Haven't noticed anything missing lately. Yet.

Dave Rathbun wrote:

For what it's worth, way back in the earlier days of this thread I posted that for me the trigger event was checking the "reduce bitrate when syncing" option. I turned that off and haven't had the issue since. Two days ago I made a complete back-up of my iTunes folder, turned that feature back on, and synced to my iPod. Several thousand files were deleted during the process. This was the only process running on my computer, and the songs were clearly there before I started the sync because they're on the back-up.

Granted I am using an older version of iTunes, so I don't expect a lot of sympathy. 🙂 But in my case I have clearly identified the culprit, and I can recreate the issue. At some point I will upgrade to the latest version of iTunes and see if the same issue exists.

I am on iTunes 11 and I have Convert to lower bit rate when syncing option selected and I don't lose any songs...

I have seen a few other scattered reports that seem to implicate that option, but I'm sure there must be other factors involved. I wasn't able to reproduce it when I tried.

tt2

tt2, I remember you were one of the folks attempting to help me back when I first posted. I remember you saying you weren't able to reproduce the issue, and simply assumed there was some other factor from my environment that was also contributing. It could be my library size (over 60K tracks), my destination (iPod classic 160GB model), the fact that I'm using an external NAS to store my library (Synology Disk Station), my operating system, or the fact that my computer points east and my monitor faces north-west. 😁 The only thing I can say is that I went well over a year without a single missing track, at which point I decided to run my experiment. I backed up my complete iTunes music folder, turned on the "reduce bitrate" option, and set my iPod to sync. The process ran overnight due to the number of songs that iTunes needed to process. The next day I looked and there were thousands of MP3 files missing. The weird part is there wasn't any sort of discernible pattern. In some cases only one track from an album remained, in other cases only one track was deleted.

I may have mentioned it before, but if you have something reproducible, you could sign up for a free Apple Developer account and make use of Apple Bug Reporter. They don't generally talk back, but they do claim to read everything. It would be useful to know exactly which build of iTunes you are running now, and if the symptoms are the same when using the latest version. NAS storage may possibly be a factor since iTunes is unlikely to be tested with it directly and the file systems don't always behave exactly like local storage. There was an issue with iOS app syncing and NAS a few builds ago.

tt2

Not saying it doesn't happen. Just that is doesn't happen to me.

It could be my library size (over 60K tracks), my destination (iPod classic 160GB model), the fact that I'm using an external NAS to store my library (Synology Disk Station), my operating system, or the fact that my computer points east and my monitor faces north-west.

The north-west thingy is the most likely cause 😁, however, NAS is the best bet. Plenty of problems with iTunes & NAS in the forums...

60K tracks and iPod I suspect are completely irrelevant as others with no iPod have seen this issue

It seems a little complicated for me to do what you are saying. I wish I new how to restore just the tracks I am missing without creating duplicate titles. Can you help me with some ideas for a system that won't require a ton of hunting and resorting? I love Apple products, but this missing titles and duplicate titles across communicating and syncing with the cloud and multiple devices has become really frustrating.

Do you know why tracks get removed from my hard drive? I know that I did not do it.

SO why, genius do you think that others have problems? Suddenly the same thing has happened to me. A little testing, i.e. creating a Yosemite bootup disk with new song files causes the same hidden file effect. What constructive advice do you suggest, genius?

stigmus wrote:

SO why, genius do you think that others have problems? Suddenly the same thing has happened to me. A little testing, i.e. creating a Yosemite bootup disk with new song files causes the same hidden file effect. What constructive advice do you suggest, genius?

Why are you asking me for advice and being rude, doofus?

Did you bother to even read my posts?

NAS is the best bet.