Q: Songs Disappearing from iTunes

No use having the Music item in our sidebar. It's meant for useful shortcuts.

Click [your name]. That's the link to your Home folder with everything you have. Music is in there.

I think you should open it, and you will see the iTunes folder. Don't open that folder, go to your top menu bar and select "Open Time Machine".

After a few moments you will have a space travel screen. Click the big up arrow (pointing from you, not towards you) until you reach the date when you last remember to have had a healthy iTunes folder.

On the right-hand side you can also jump straight to a date.

When on a good day, click iTunes then Restore.

You will be prompted to keep a copy or replace the current one. Might as well replace.

Then wait for the copy to finish. Start iTunes and be happy

Attila wrote:

 

No use having the Music item in our sidebar. It's meant for useful shortcuts.

???

Going to Music is a useful shortcut.

That is why you can even set it in Finder Preferences!

Hi all

after thinking i was going crazy i decided to google "disappearing music itunes" to see if anybody else had a similar problem....HA! I am soo glad my mental condition is , at least in this case, nothing to worry about.

Stuff dissappears! From the harddrive too, without a trace. My music library is about 80 Gb, a lot of it bought through Itunes. In some cases the song is still visible in Itunes but gone from the disk, in other cases it has just  vapourised. I have to retrace my purchases and additions so i do not know at this time exactely how many songs i've lost but it has been going on for at least a year. The cloud doesn't have them either.

I have a feeling that parts of an album can go missing too, leaving only a couple (usually 2) songs. Could this be playlist related? Synch issues? Match issues?

I have a laptop, an ipad, iphone and ipod, all connected to my account and Itunes, it would be a big problem if you couldn't trust the " hub"...

For now i am doing double back ups just to be sure i don't lose any more tracks.

Hope this gets sorted out!

Cheers

Maarten

Hi all. I've been going through this as well and have some thoughts about it.

I started noticing the exclamation points a while ago, but figured that iTunes had just lost track of things and I'd fix it later. (My iTunes music folder was in an unusual location.)

Last night I installed iTunes 11 and noticed the exclamation points again. This time I decided to fix them. A few of the files I found hiding in various places on my HD (but not in the iTunes Music folder... weird). So I told iTunes where they were and got them into the iTunes Music folder and that part is fine. But... a bunch of the files were just GONE. Nowhere on the drive at all. I did not delete them (intentionally -- but read on) and would not have -- a few are irreplaceable (songs recorded by friends, etc.)

The majority of the library (several thousand tracks) was intact, but these few hundred missing tracks worried me. How could they be gone? They are still on my iPod -- I've listened to some of them in the last week. The iPod (old 5G Video) last synced a couple of weeks ago. Which is after the exclamation points appeared.

For many of them, I tried to "get info." Then iTunes would tell me it couldn't find the track, and did I want to locate it? I clicked "no" and it then went into the info panel. And I noticed that iTunes thought they all had a weird location. It said they were in a folder on a networked drive (let's call it "netdrive 1", and the folder was called "itunes-test-delete"!

Now, that network drive has been gone for maybe 2.5 years now. But it was just called "netdrive", not "netdrive 1". I can't think of any reason why there would have been an itunes-test-delete folder in it, but sometimes my spouse would work on the Mac as well.

So the first weirdness -- the location is one that hasn't existed for a couple of years, and the drive name shouldn't have a 1 at the end. It must have mounted as a duplicate drive, somehow. But if the files have been gone for two+ years, why are they still on the iPod after multiple syncs over the last couple of years?

So then I noticed something else. Every single missing file ended in " 1.mp3". So, for example, it might be named "daves_song 1.mp3" or "dance_song 1.mp3." This means... that they were all duplicate files at some point. (It's possible to just rename them with a 1, of course, but with all of them named that way, it's more likely they were all dupes.) All of them were duplicates of existing files on my system when they were created.

And now I think I know what may have happened. This is just a theory, but:

1. One of us, maybe my spouse, duplicated some songs to experiment on the network drive a few years ago (the itunes-test-delete folder which was apparently on a drive that no longer exists).

2. The files were deleted when the test was done, but after they had been added to the iTunes library. iTunes didn't know they were gone. The network drive itself eventually went away, too.

3. At that point the library had a bunch of duplicate songs listed. One existing track and one phantom track for each of these songs.

4. At some point, the duplicates annoyed me. I had iTunes search for duplicates and deleted some.

5. So... my theory is that instead of deleting the phantom tracks, I deleted the real ones, leaving phantom tracks in their place in the iTunes Library. I had no reason to notice a problem immediately -- iTunes thought they were still there until it eventually tried to play them, and unless I was actually watching it at the time, I wouldn't notice they were missing.

6. And perhaps the reason they stayed on the iPod is because the originals were already there and the dupes had never gotten to the iPod in the first place (quite likely as I used to manually maintain my iPod before I started letting it just sync), and as far as the iTunes Library was concerned, those songs were still on my drive, so no need to delete them when syncing.

As I said, this is just a theory. But do any of you think something like this might have contributed to your problem? (And is it likely to have caused mine?) Any of you prune any duplicates before you noticed tracks with the exclamation point? Also, do your exclamation-point tracks show a URL that is on a network drive that is no longer connected?

The good news is that the tracks were on the iPod and I could use a third-party tool to get them back. The bad news... when I plugged in the iPod tonight I got the dreaded "iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPod"... That's what you call good timing. Even better, my Time Machine backup machine was hosed recently. It's back up again, but it doesn't have any old backups old enough to help, since it's only got the last few weeks. Sigh.

All the tracks are still on the iPod, just the iTunesDB on the iPod is hosed. So I'm working on solving that. But that's another topic entirely. I think the disappearing files are because iTunes doesn't know which files are legit.

This seems to have happened to me since I updated to iTunes 11. For the last couple of days, my iPod shuffle warns me that it cannot sync a song.  I go to the song in my songs list in iTunes and I see that it has the exclamation point next to it.  Not only that song, but an entire album may be missing.

I right click a track and try to locate it, and it's no where to be found. Not on my external hard drive iTunes folder or my internal.

I have no idea how many songs are missing, but this is a nightmare.  There doesn't seem to be any solution because they are gone now. 

This is also happening to my music, I haven't done anything that would make it dissapear and it is also some songs that I have bought from the itunes store! Very frustrated.

Wow, I feel better. Thought I was insane. I synched up when I got a new computer last week and now I'm missing at least 38 out of 117 songs.  I looked at my old iphone and I see all 38 songs on that phone are now missing from my current phone song list. Not sure if there's others gone.

However, Apple support was worthless, ending with them asking for $19.95 to ask a question about my soungs, that I paid for, disappearing.

And I cant get anywhere with the directions (graciously) offered here. I cannot get to itunes media>music or trash bin or organize library or music/time machine etc, etc.

HELP

I can't believe how many of us are having these problems.  I have whole albums both purchased and transferred from cds just disappear from my iPhone, they are still on my itunes account but not on my phone.  Itunes is very user unfriendly and I can put some back but not others.

I've now lost close to 400 songs from my playlist! And they cannot be recovered. This appears to be happening to thousands of iTunes users.

<Edited by Host>

every now and then i miss a song. i have 1000s so i dont really remember each one. Am on the decks, playing, looking for a song and its missing!!

i find the song later on if i spotlight it. Its in my music folder but for some reason it disappears form itunes!

action please!! God knows how many songs i miss that am not aware of..

i think its an ios-osx sync thing (am not an expert, just a hunch)

very frustrating... to the point of being a deal breaker.

I see it happening right before my eyes

Trax i've just played!

Gooooone!

Right, itunes is out, no loss, just my 1500,- or so euro's of dodgy music bought  through this itunes worm hole

Nonono, apple says, its not a bug, its a feature!

You're version is obsolete!

Strange Fruit

<Edited by Host>

Good thing you make regular backups...

Yeah Chris, thing is though i shouldn't have to.

I send all trax to iCloud ( back up?), when re-importing them because of severe invisibilty

it says: not available, sorry...

Besides that, data just vapourises every time i go through my music, or at least has sone so.

I did not have to worry about this in the past, and with a close to a 100 gb music section, this is a unnerving thing right?

I am playing safe, taking my loss, and saying byebye to itunes..,

Bye Bye! Should Have Known Better...

M

Chris, making backups isn't the issue. I do make backups, and I have a RAID system in my desktop. Yet when the application software that is supposed to create data files deletes them instead, that warrants more than a smart remark, don't you think?

I've been silent in this topic for a long time, but through various upgrades I continue to have the problem. I thought I had solved it, but turns out that when I turn on the "down sample to 128bit" setting the problem crops back up again. So I'm forced to be less efficient as far as space usage on my iPod (128bit is fine for iPod listening, but I rip at a much higher bit rate for desktop listening).

I have never had music drop while playing. But I can recreate the issue every time by ripping and syncing. Yet Apple won't support me because my iPod is outside of warranty, when it's clearly the iTunes software that's at fault.

I looked in my iTunes music folder, and I'm certain it contains only about half of all the music/audiobooks I had in the library before they vanished a week ago. If the rest aren't there, where else could I look?