Songs Disappearing from iTunes

This has been happening for years and years and years and years. Last night I discovered that an audiobook that I had bought was missing one of the three files so I went to the apple store to redownload it. I got a dialog that informed me that since I had bought it before, that this download was free. 4 hours later, my CC was charged for $21. Massive deletion of random files. Or are they random? Is apple intentionally removing these files from our computers? The time machine laundering is a big clue. Is this Apples new business model? This happens on macs and PCs and has happened in every version of iTunes I have ever used. One telling fact is that the files that are missing are the ones that apple no longer has the rights to distribute and have been removed from the store.

I have had enough.

Can Apple actually decide what songs we can have on our ipods? Is that legal?

Apple cannot remove content from your iTunes or iPod.

To AdamKB: So can Apple explain everybody's concern about the exclamation signs and missing files in our playlists? One minutes it's there and then it's gone? Is my pc eating my files.......

Without actually sitting down at a machine experiencing this problem, I would presume it's a case of file corruption or data loss. Been known to happen.

That's what backups are for.

Back ups??? Why is it only itunes files disappearing??? I'd like to hear from someone WHO has actually sat down at a machine and experienced this, not just presume. Don't need someone answering me that hasn't seen this. I don't presume my songs are gone, they ARE gone.

I have seen it. Seems it is a random glitch in iTunes.

The songs are gone from the iTunes library but they are still in my iTunes Music folder.

A few times (2-3) songs have been gone from the iTunes music folder but I simply restore from my backup.

I, too, have found that my songs, movies, tv shows have disappeared from my iTunes after I followed the instructions in Apple's own Article 305451 to transfer the library to a different disk than C:. I followed the instructions to the letter and wham, my songs are in the new location, but iTunes has been wiped empty! What a joke. You wonder if companies like Apple and Microsoft do these things just to **** off people and to keep "job security" because it keeps them as the experts. Now I have to figure out how to get the songs back into iTunes without creating the library back on the C: drive where I was trying to move it from in the first place. How frustrating.

I'm going to try and help you here, I'm no expert on Itunes nor computers but here's the way I THINK I'm set up. BTW, I'm runnning windows 7 . When I right click on the itunes icon on the desktop and hit "open file location", it is showing that my itunes player is on C drive, my itunes music folder is on my E drive. Just for the record, do you have two hardrives in your pc (or one external) or do you have one partitionned? I have two hard drives in mine, C and E.

I try to keep my data files (music, photos, etc) on one hd (E) and program files on another (C). I think the itunes player is just a program and the songs in the library can be anywhere else on the pc, even on another hd, but itunes needs to know which folder and where it is.

Once itunes opened up, if I click on edt, preferences, advanced, it will show you where your itune music folder is listed So if it's not showing the new location, click the change button and point it towards your new location.

To get your files back into your itunes, just click music at the top left, then click on file, add file or add folder (for albums) and then navigate to where your itunes folder is in your new location.

You can select and hold shift and select multiple files/folders or select one folder at a time.

Hope I don't confuse you. I just went through heck and back trying to set up a Western Digital media live player to be able to play my music, movies, photos from my pc to my television.

PS: If anyone out there wants to correct me, please be my guest.

SM

I seem to be having this issue now. Song files and a few entire albums have completely disapearing from my external drive. I've searched for them on both drives with no luck.

I've been using iTunes on my Macs for years w/o this sort of issue. Absurd!

I just noticed this today.

I found songs gone from library also but still in the Itunes media folder.

I see a trend...... It is all the songs whose file names begin with a number that have disappeared.

Something screwed up in itunes as this never happened before.

It seems they all have to be manually located, i am renaming the file and re adding them to itunes

So now I'm having the same issue where we noticed an entire cd was gone from itunes. Well, we thought, simple, we'll just grab the original cd and put it back on, no biggie. Except that Itunes wont download the cd into itunes. We get an error message when we try. When I went to the Itunes store we found the cd but it can't be purchased as a whole cd although you can buy the individual songs. So today we notice a few more songs missing and all of them are found on the computer, however when I click one to play in itunes it wont open and asks me if I want to format my drive C. When I click on other songs from different artist in a different folder it won't do anything at all. This is frustrating.

Yep... Me too... I am brand new to Itunes (on a relatively old laptop), and thought wow! brill, transferred my entire wma library to aac and itunes (obviously taking care to copy everything to the itunes music folder) and because my poor laptop was running out of memory, I deleted my whole wma collection (kinda dumb in retrospect but you dont expect a programme to start randomly deleting things)

Please don't insult my intelligence by suggesting ... did you copy it to itunes in the first place. Yes I did, because the songs are sitting pretty on my ipod. However my mystery deleting files started last night after I signed up to the istore, and purchased some albums... coincidence?

However I am now really scared to plug in my ipod to itunes, to sync up my new albums, in case itunes f***s up my ipod. I have switched off auto sync, but how do I manually sync selected songs? PLEASE PLEASE HELP ME... I am a complete ITunes novice 😢

Try upgrading your itunes to the latest version. 10.5.0.142

I did since this has occurred, and it seemed like the exclamation marks disappeared although i'm not sure it has really fixed the problem or not.

Always a good idea to backup all your music on a external drive separate from all your computers. You can't trust itunes or any software and never know when something will crap out.

So, it's hard to know who to reply to about all this, but here goes. I posted a few months back that a whole bunch of my library--a totally random selection of about half of my stuff, both iTunes purchased and uploaded CDs--had disappeared. As several people have said, it was still there on my iPod, but I was afraid to sync it in case it all got erased. I contacted Apple and, bless their hearts, they offered to let me ONE TIME ONLY re-download all of the music I'd ever bought from iTunes. The only thing was, this didn't help me with the fact that I was still left having to re-rip hundreds of albums from CDs. Nor did Apple even begin to suggest why this was happening, or how to keep it from happening again. So, basically, thanks for next-to-nothing. So, for 30 bucks or so, I downloaded Media Widget, which allowed me to upload all the music from my iPod. This worked, presto. The only thing then is that I was now mysteriously left with doubles of half my library--as if all the missing stuff had somehow reappeared from the ether. When the oh-so-friendly-and-earnest Apple service rep contacted me (several times) to check in about taking them up on their offer (and was I happy with their service?) he had nothing much to offer about this annoyance, other than well, sir, what you have to do now is go through and delete each one of the duplicates one by one.

Anyway, I've got my music back. When is Apple going to really deal with this situation and offer people the free software to get their music back? Hello? Apple? Hello? Do you all get the feeling that Apple isn't listening?