"song could not be used because the original file could not be found"

Simple fix: I highlighted the song in iTunes....clicked "delete" which prompted me to choose whether or not to delete the song from iCloud...DO NOT delete from iCloud. Once I did this I noticed the song was still in my iTunes list and the iCloud download icon showed up. I clicked the download from iCloud and...voilà!!! It worked!

Are the files stored locally or are they shown with a cloud symbol that means they are in the cloud. Cloud tracks can be played, but not transferred to a device. When did things go wrong? See Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash if appropriate.

tt2

This is the most frustrating thing ever. How hard is it to upload a song to my phone? This is the single most basic function of an mp3 player phone.

The file is there.

iTunes knows the file is there.

iTunes plays the file

iTunes cannot sync because iTunes can't find the **** file.

This happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, or that the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout,or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place.

Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to get info, then cancel when asked to try to locate the track. Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions.

Alternatively, as long as you can find a location holding the missing files, then you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes .

tt2

I have not moved anything anywhere, but now I cannot play--and cannot find--music that I paid for from the iTunes Store that was on my hard drive. I cannot seem to locate these tunes on my back-up drive, either, but I'm also wondering, "Why should I have to do this?"

Can someone please explain in simple terms than an idiot like me can comprehend how to get my music back? It would bother me far less if I were missing stuff that I'd copied from my own CDs, but I paid for these songs.

This is just BS. I tried following the directions above, but it referred to my back-up drive. Why should I have to suddenly go on a search mission for music that I have paid for? It's not like I buy a whole lot of music either, so this really pi**es me off royally!

Thanks!

Hi Eric,

Looks like you are being reminded of Murphy's Law, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. I've offered both an explanation and a solution earlier in this thread. It is probably too late to work out exactly where the mistake was made and while it might help you to vent, we're only fellow users trying to help.

My solution presupposes that you can locate the content somewhere on your hard drives. If your media can be found, e.g. by searching your entire computer for a specific file and comparing the true location with where iTunes thinks it should be, then a repair should be possible. If the files have magically evaporated from both your computer, and the backup, then, apart from anything else, you need a good look at your backup strategy which was supposed to protect you from losing your files.

Depending upon where you are in the world you will be able to download past music and selected other media from your purchase history. iTunes won't redownload content it thinks is in the library, even if it is missing, so having confirmed that particular files appear in the your purchased history section of the iTunes Store you can delete the current entries, then redownload.

BTW Here is my recommended backup strategy which will let you spot if source files have been accidentally removed before continuing.

tt2

Thank you very much for your rather condescending and patronizing reply. I am thoroughly chastened vis-a-vis my obviously flawed back-up strategy.

I have a large back-up hard drive that is supposed to be regularly backing up the entire content of my hard drive, yet only some of my iTunes library -- a very small part of it, actually -- shows up in the backups, going all the way back more than a year. (Yes, I know. Check the back-up settings.) The folder indicates that it's the iTunes music library, but the content appears to be solely that of one of my "favorites" playlists. A substantial portion of my iTunes library has gone missing.

The curious thing is that all of my music (I have not checked all 700+ entries) appears to remain available on my iPad (have not checked my iPod yet). If this is, indeed, the case, it strikes me that one should be able to back up the iTunes library on my PC from the iPad. I don't use iTunes to play music all that often, but I'd like to find it still there whenever I want to do so.

Murphy aside, I feel my frustration is justified, albeit misdirected on this forum. Perhaps you and others feel it's inevitable that data just disappear or become mysteriously unavailable for no particular reason and are okay with blaming Murphy, God or Satan. I am not.

This sort of thing should be an extremely rare occurrence, yet it is not. I've seen dozens, if not hundreds, of posts on this particular failure of the Apple software and data management system, on which our devices -- none of which are inexpensive -- rely. Neither should one have to jump through a confounding series of hoops to recover data; most of us are not computer cognoscenti but mere users.

BTW, while I have had the occasional file corruption issue, no other files have ever inexplicably and suddenly (and randomly) disappeared from this PC, so I've never actually had to rely on my back-up drive at all. In fact, this marks the first time I've needed to recover data from a back-up drive in more than 25 years of computer ownership and use.

We users should be demanding more of Apple and its software; we should not all have to be computer and system gurus in order to deal with the deficiencies of Apple's system. If I had to guess, my tunes went missing as a result of one of the proliferation of operating system and iTunes software "upgrades."

Sorry, I probably hit condescending in response to the rage. 😊

You can pull iTunes purchases back from your iPad, or download them again from the iTunes Store (regional caveats apply). For anything else you'll need a third party tool that supports iOS devices. I'm sure there are free to use ones out there but they are increasingly hard to find. For older iPods it is relatively easy to extract everything in disk mode, unhide what you've extracted and get iTunes to reorganize it based upon the tag data. Easy unless your library consists of .wav files.

Don't get me wrong, I wish it was all easier too. Part of the reason it is difficult is because the system was designed to stop people casually slurping up music from all of their friends. However the fact that there are always other ways, and easier ones at that, doesn't mean iTunes is ever going to get a general two-way sync feature.

I'm also not certain that iTunes is the culprit for your missing files, though of course it could be. iTunes tends not to do anything with your files except when you change something, and then only the files you are actually working with. If you rename an album it will update the tags and, if you're letting iTunes keep the media folder organised, it will move the tracks into a folder with the new album name. If you play a track and iTunes reads the tag and finds its own records are out of date then it might make an adjustment too. And of course if you designate a new media folder and consolidate the files to that it will do as its told. But, in general, iTunes leaves your stuff alone. Windows Media Player on the other hand is more than happy to scan your files, attempt to update the tags, and move them around where it sees fit. It can even do this when it has been launched as a background process by a web page! WMP & iTunes

If and when I spot repeatable buggy behaviour then I submit a bug report, but despite seeing plenty of posts blaming iTunes for having lost media I've have yet to see it myself.

I am familiar with the occasional habit that iTunes has of not completing a library upgrade properly, but when that happens the library has fewer entries than it should have, or none, but the media remains present on the drive. There is a relatively easy fix, but you are right, it shouldn't go wrong, and if it does iTunes should be able to recover gracefully. I could/should do a feature request for that.

tt2

Thanks. I'm extremely reluctant to relegate this particular issue to the "It's a mystery we're not meant to understand, my son" category, however. The songs exist on both of my devices, as best as I can determine by spot checking, yet they no longer are available on the "parent" computer (from which I'm more likely to play them here at home), and I'm not satisfied that a plausible explanation remains elusive.

Outside of creating a couple or three "best of" lists of music (which iTunes made disappear during an upgrade, and, yes, I do blame the software), I pretty much leave things to the mercy of Apple and iTunes. Another quirky bit of behavior involved iTunes creating two copies of several pieces of music, but that involved transitioning from one PC to another -- a task that is far from intuitive.

I certainly can appreciate that Apple wants to minimize music theft. It's unfortunate, however, that no matter how high a wall vendors erect to keep out the thieves, 2% will figure out how to scale it anyway, and the rest of us honest folks must live with the consequences and complications that this approach engenders.

I do wish Apple would quit attempting to second-guess the user at every turn. For example, if I don't listen to a podcast for a couple of weeks (probably because I was able to hear the show live), iTunes stops refreshing it, and I cannot find a way to turn that off. Each time this happens, I have to tell it, yes, I still want iTunes to refresh the podcast. The fact that this is the default setting, however, speaks volumes with respect to Apple's attitude toward users. I don't need Apple arranging my music or creating playlists (Genius, indeed) for me either.

Now let's see if I can figure out how to make the library on my PC reflect what exists on my devices.

Out of curiosity, and in the unlikely event that I can actually gather together enough information to understand what is happening in these cases, is it the case that the entries are still in your library, but a certain proportion now show up with the dreaded exclamation mark, or are they just not there at all any more, either in the iTunes interface or on the hard drive?

You can stop iTunes organising media by turing off Keep... and Copy... under Edit > Preferences > Advanced.

You can turn off Genius from Edit > Preferences > General.

And the self-suspending podcast thing drives me nuts too. 👿

tt2

>a certain proportion now show up with the dreaded exclamation mark

Yes. The tunes remain on my iPod and iPad (apparently -- I have not checked every single one, since I have better uses for my time at the moment). The missing music is not to be found on my hard drive or on my back-up drive, so it's possible they've been missing for quite a while now. I went back more than a year in my HD backups, and the iTunes folder displays just a fraction of my music library.

See this post for suggestions on recovery tools. I've used the manual method on iPods a number of times to rescue friend's media. If it were me I'd make a separate library to recover the files into, "connect" my original library to the recovered tracks using my FindTracks tool, then consolidate the library. It depends on whether or not you want to keep the original date added values, ratings, play counts etc.

tt2

If it makes you feel any better, Eric, I am having exactly the same problem and I haven't done anything that would cause certain media to disappear from my iTunes library. All "missing" files are still on my iPhone, iPad, etc.

I have had the mysterious exclamation point issue before, but had been able to locate the missing files somewhere else on my hard drive. This time they are not locatable.

This just happened to me with the dreaded explanation point on my entire iTunes library of 9K+ songs. After combing thru a few responses to the same problem, the light in my head went on - I keep my entire iTunes lisbrary on an external drive for the additional storage capacity and we lost power for a couple hours a few days ago and I now know that that external drive does not go back on without hitting the power button. Voila! Dreaded exclamation points all went away! :-)

I've been getting the same error message for items downloaded from the Itunes stire... but only if they were recent purchases.

What I have done is delete the file then go to my recent purchases and redownload it. This has worked for me.