Every time I download the newest update for my iPhone, it changes all my playlists on iTunes. ON ITUNES!!!!
I am not aware that an iTunes update will affect any Playlist in iTunes. It shouldn't and I'm not aware that it's ever happened to me.
Certain Playlists (Smart Playlists such as the Recently Added one) will update automatically, so which Playlists are you referring to? Are the Playlists that change Smart Playlists or Regular Playlists:
This is the third time in the past year, I'm getting tired of having to rebuild my playlists. Why even offer itunes store to buy music if every time I buy something, add it to a playlist, then update, and they are all messed up again.
After an extensive online search, I found an article about a program Apple says works, called FoneTool. So I bought the licensed version because the freebee wasn't going to do much for me. SO I download it to both my iphone and PC, input the registration codes, and synch them together and guess what. When I plugged the iphone in, it auto synched to itunes and all the playlists that were on my phone reset as well. So now I spent $$$ on a program that won't do much more for me than itunes on it's own does. Why is itunes so user unfriendly?
I'm almost on my last bit of sanity when it comes to apple. New update ON IPHONE, and my PC PLAYLISTS reset again. All the music I loaded from CD's many years ago and any music I purchased from other sites such as beatport or amazon get removed from my existing playlists, so I have to reload them to itunes and add them back into my playlists. I have around 40 different ones. About 30 of them need to be fixed whenever IOs updates.
They are regular playlists.
The files are still available, they just get removed from my playlists, so I have to add them again. There is no !!! next to a greyed out song, the songs are removed from my playlists. What weirds me out is it only happens when I update my iphone, then when it synchs to my pc, the playlist fiasco triggers. The files are stored on an internal hard drive.
Happened again. Really considering quitting apple altogether and just buying a mp3 player and a cheap phone.
Hang on, if you have to "reload them to iTunes", then that's why they're disappearing from your Playlists. Not only that, but in your second post, you implied that the music was purchased from the iTunes Store,
Why even offer itunes store to buy music if every time I buy something, add it to a playlist, then update, and they are all messed up again
...but now you mention that the missing songs are from your CDs or from other online retailers and not the Apple store. This may be significant (let's see if we can confirm this).
I assume then, that the missing songs are still listed in your iTunes Library but then have an exclamation mark next to the title and that iTunes reports that it cannot find the original file (if not, please let us know what it does do when to try to play one of these songs). If the entry for a missing song is not present, please mention that.
In either event, then we need to investigate why the songs keep getting lost (and I doubt that it is "iTunes" that is actually removing the songs).
Usually, an update to iTunes should not cause any of the issues that you describe. Likewise, an update to your phone should not change your playlists or cause music to disappear from your iTunes Library. I speak from experience; I have a very large amount of music in my library from CDs and from Beatport and Bandcamp (as well as other sources), and no update to iTunes or my devices has caused the issue you describe.
How do you perform the iTunes updates: do you tap on Update and let iTunes do the work, or are you removing iTunes and re-installing it? How are the updates to the phone being done, is it direct on the phone or is it via iTunes?
One further question; where are the files for the rogue songs stored? Are they on the internal drive on the computer or are they on an extremal drive?
itunes playlists keep changing after a new update
