Itunes 11 deleted ALL my music!

Yeah. I reported it to Apple.

See, there are many things that blow about the new iTunes interface. One of them is a SEVERE data loss bug.

When you have a new podcast episode and you right click to "Show in podcast directory", what is left selected is NOT the podcast epidode you selected, but the entire podcast feed and all of the episodes/shows downloaded for that feed!!

This means that when you press delete to delete what you think will be that podcast episode, iTunes deletes the entire list of all podcasts for that podcast feed that you have ever downloaded.

The fact that the product shipped like this, with this terrible bug, using Arial as a font (not part of the Mac experience at all), and with the terrible GUI that replaces buttons that looked like buttons with simple graphics that do not tell the user that they are buttons means that people need to get fired and need to get fired fast.

Im glad im not alone here, I wish I had done a little research before updating itunes, its an awful user experience compared to the previous version, oh hang on" ! "and more ! and more! Gone gone gone, 100's Gs GONE!

"you can download again from store" is totally weak. what about importing all those Cd's again , what about real time vinyl copy all over again, yes some of it is backed up on drives, but I had multiple music drives, How do I begin to put all back together? Why should I have to spend my time trying to fix their mistake. For some of us it isnt as simple as plugging your pod back in. Its just a bug riddled mess, apple please this should never have been released! The message is clear, if you use our software to play media, the only media that is safe from deleation is the stuff you purchased from us.

hey ok

the same problem occured with mine, and 6000 songs, gone except maybe 30. so after fiddling around, i clicked on my main icon 'the house' in my dock, then i clicked 'open in finder'... then under 'search for' i clicked 'all documents' i found my music all together by clicking and sorting then to 'kind' and all the mp3 and mp4 was together. then i highlighted them all by holding my hand on the touchpad and dragging my other hand over all the music (maybe place then in a list format so this is easier), then i right clicked and pressed 'export to itunes' I hope this helps!!

it just finished exporting and it worked!

Well, all of mine went in the trash since I pressed delete, expecting that it would delete the one episode, not the whole podcast feed.

Luckily, I did not empty the trash.

I am in the process of restoring to 10.7 now and have to manually restore about 1/2 of my library.

Again, people need to get fired for this version of iTunes. The people who designed the GUI and the project management.

EVERYONE READ THIS IT WORKS. When you click to open up iTunes, HOLD DOWN SHIFT. You'll have the option to choose which library to open, and your old ones will be saved to your computer. Your newer songs not on the older library will be there.

All that does is allows you to select a different music library. If iTunes has already mislead you so that you hit delete, and emptied your trash expecting 1 file to be deleted but a few thousand were, then a few thousand files were just deleted.

I am still rebuilding my podcast library and the music library backup from iTunes does not have all the podcast feeds that I have podcast directories for, 1/2 of my ratings were lost and the playcount of each is also lost.

6+ years of bulding a podcast library, now without 1/2 of the history of how I rated them and what's been played and when.

wow. i just turned on my ipad after three weeks of not using it. 40GB of music has disappeared. wow. i spent 15 months building up this library. i use it for monthly DJ gigs, so the last time i used it was february 2. i went on holiday february 4. not sure i did any special tinkering with my ipad on february 3 but it's possible i downloaded itunes 11. wow. totally floored by this.

All is not (always lost)...

Background:

1) My old PC got trashed. I had backups but couldn't trust them due to the trashing being caused by a virus that IBM field support couldn't shift

2) I installed iTunes 11 on a new PC, made a backup of my iPod classic to a USB drive using touchcopy, imported this backup and some prior purchases that weren't anylonger in my iPod library into the new one having set the location for Library tunes to be copied to be the USB drive of the new PC.

3) I then sync-ed the new library and the iPod and left everything thinking I had 6000 songs set up on a new host.

4) The iPod is fine still (and has been throughout).

5) When my PC can get through to the iStore then both the iTunes Library and the backup are visible fine on the USB drive. The drive shows about 70 Gb used up (35 for the Library, 35 for the backup). In explorer I can see the folder tree and song files.

6) The bizare thing is that when I'm offline the Library view in iTunes lists all the songs, but any attempt to play them gets an iTunes can't locate file message.

7) Now at the top level the USB drive properties show that 70Gb is still used up, but when you go into the sub folders the space used is reported as zero in the Library and only 7Gb in the backup (basically any file in a level 2 or deeper). So somehow iTunes is hiding the local files when it can't get through to the store despite what I have knowingly asked it to do.

8) Seeing this I thought I'd got the "iTunes 11 ate all my files" bug described here and was going to give Apple a rocket. No need to now.

9) However I'm none the wiser about how I get to see songs I legally have the right to store locally and play when not tied by the umbilical directly to the iStore (ie when offline)?

Would I have to de-authorize my old host PC first?

Is there some other way to achieve what I want rather than what Apple deems to be "good for me" hiding in what passes for documentation in Apple land?

Yup. Looks like the big companies want to do some serious changes for more control. Countless gigs of files deleted after years of sorting, refining playlists and more. Thanks for f****g up everything, just felt like, wanted to f****g do something really bad!!!

This is so frustrating. All I did was an update, and now only a select few songs are left. I downloaded many from CD's that I just sold. It really shouldn't matter how I downloaded them, it was music I paid for, one way or another. APPLE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS ISSUE AND SHOULD BE HOLDING THEMSELVES ACCOUNTABLE!!!!

Update - I think in my case it was just set up teething troubles.

I can now see all my songs on and offline, and all is behaving as I expect.

I am still not pleased with the needless stress of having thought all my files had been eaten. If I had cleared out and reformatted the disk when it looked like all had been lost (a reasonable step in starting over from a clean state when doing a restore), then I really would have lost the files.

Messing, even temporarily with the files visible through explorer, and accessible to iTunes is not at all cool.

Unbelievable, I've been losing it for over a month now thinking I was all alone. Lost my whole library of about 100 gig..

So I went to add some music into empty new itunes from a harddrive, but it said unable add files to itunes because you have no disk space left on your hard drive ?

So I went to the itunes media folder to see if the 100 gig was there, sure enough it was not there, or anywhere else on my hard drive.

So then I downloaded "Onyx" app, and it said the 100 gig was still there ??

So I went and deleted those "previous library files in the itunes folder, Tried rebooting, repairing permissions, reset pram, tried all of it and nothing worked.

Ive been super busy so all ive done is move 50 gig of other files to an external hard drive, so that I can put some music on my computer (because it still said no space on hard drive) and its still the same now ?

100 gig of no excistant files are taking up space on my hard drive ! Im going to do a complete restore when I get some time, unless someone reads this that has any ideas ??

Anyway hows this.. I was so close to NOT doing the update. I was saying to myself "dont update, look what happened last time" This is because I am still ****** from last time, that update they wrecked the interface, by moving album artwork and making it really small. I was worried another update might make it worse again.

And sure enough interface is worse... and I lost my music library.. and I have to do a complete restore...

The funny thing is I posted a huge rant here in apple discussions before about the new interface and how the album artwork is even smaller blah blah (which was removed) but I didnt even mention I lost all my music and my computer has problems ??

I might start using a different music player. I think itunes interface gets me a little bit on my nerve..

Maybe, just a bit ?

I hate itunes! I had all of my music (around 90 G) on an external hard drive, a lot of which was vintage vinyl. So what seems to have happened was itunes imported my original mp3s, and in the original folders created m3u pointer files, and then moved the original mp3s to a new folder. Itunes then reorganzed these files completely differently, so the original organization of files was changed. I am still trying to figure out how many of the original files were deleted, but it seems most of them are there. What I did was go to the original drive and did a search with the term "*.mp3" to find the location of the mp3 files. I am trying to figure out whether there is a way to restore the mp3s to their original folder. Once I do that, I will be looking for a different media player.

I lost everything but what I ripped..*** is going on?!?!