Songs downloaded from CD getting deleted from iTunes playlist.

The "why" will depend on what happened that changed things. Let's begin by working out what has happened.

• A Playlist is just that; a playlist. If a song is no longer in a Playlist, then first of all work out if the song is still listed in your iTunes Library. Check in the main library (as opposed to any "playlists") for the song, buy looking under the artist name, the album title and/or the song title itself.
  • if you find the song, does it play? If it does not play and an exclamation mark appears next to the song title, that suggests that the file for the song has been moved, renamed or deleted from its location on your computer. If it does play, then we need to work out why it's no linger in the playlist

Starting with that, what did you find?

Battlebugs wrote:

Responded once already - no reply.

My apologies, but I have been ill and not feeling well enough to reply until now.

If a song goes missing from your iTunes Library, it will be because the file for that song is no longer where it used to be, either because it has been deleted, renamed or moved, or the path to it has been deleted or renamed.

Consider this; a song is not "in iTunes", instead it is "on your computer". All iTunes does is list the songs, manage how they are used and manage adding them to an iPod or iPhone etc. Every time you want to play a song in iTunes, or add it to a portable Apple device, iTunes looks for and uses the file for that song, which will be in a folder somewhere on your computer.

So the question you need to ask yourself is what is happening that causes iTunes to lose track of the location for a song? Possible causes include:

• • the path to the file has been changed. For example, if the file is located on an external drive, that drive must be on and ready to read before iTunes is opened. If it isn't, iTunes will look for the file but not find it:
    • one thing that can happen is if the file is stored on an external drive, when you subsequently start your computer the drive may be assigned a different drive letter to the one it had previously: for example, if the external drive was assigned drive E when you added music on it to your iTunes Library, then that's the drive that iTunes will look for every time. But if (in the following order) you plug another storage device into your computer, and that gets assigned drive E, then you start the external drive that drive will then be assigned drive F (because drive E is already in use), and finally open iTunes (so you've done it in the correct order) it means that iTunes will then be looking in drive F and not drive E
  • you have deleted, moved or renamed the original file using your computer's file manager (i.e. Windows Explorer on a Windows machine)
  • another programme has moved, deleted (or more likely) renamed the file

If you think the original file for a missing song may have been moved or renamed, look for it in Windows Explorer (Windows pc) or Finder (I believe) on a Mac. Change the name back to the original name or move it back to its original location and then look for the entry in your iTunes Library (that has the exclamation mark) and try to play it. If iTunes is now able to find the file, the song will play and the exclamation mark will be removed.