Skip empty songs in iTunes 11

The exclamation mark means that iTunes has lost the connection to the item in your iTunes Music folder. If you double-click on it, iTunes will ask if you want to locate it. If you answer "locate", you can then show iTunes where the file is. Having found it, iTunes will then be able to play it.

If you don't have the files anymore, then you should delete these songs. The are now just a bother.

I have the same problem as The Foo Fighter.

Many albums in my music library are stored on an external drive, but I don't always carry it with me or connect it.

I usually just set iTunes to shuffle and listen to music that way. It used to skip any track it couldn't find. Now, it interrupts the music flow with a popup message asking me if I would like to locate the file.

This essentially means I can't listen to the music I have stored on my MacBook Pro on shuffle anymore, because iTunes expects me to come back to the computer to click 'cancel' everytime it encounters a song it can't find.

I don't want to delete these 'missing' tracks from iTunes, because they are not missing, I know exactly where they are. However, I don't think I should be required to connect my external drive every time I use iTunes.

I could create a massive playlist which contains all the tracks which are stored locally, but this means I need to constantly maintain and update that playlist when I get new music or shift albums over to the external drive.

Basically, this change pushes a great deal of work onto the user, when a simple 'skip unlocated tracks in Shuffle' option would do. Does such an option exist, or does anyone know of any alternatives (other than 'keep your external drive connected').

Thanks

I have the same issue and can't find a setting that will allow me to skip these tracks.

They have not fixes this yet. Not by far.

I'm on 12.5.1. It's friggin 2016. Absolutely agree. I have some of my library on an external drive, some locally on my laptops hard drive. If I do not have the external drive plugged in, playback halts with a dialog box saying 'the original file cannot be found" for every song that is located on the external drive. Previous versions have just skipped this dialog box and continued to the next found file. This essentially makes iTunes unusable. Shuffle songs is def out of the question.

Apple seems to be nosediving iTunes straight into the ground for any users that actually have a music library. ***. Even if you subscribe to Apple Music, not everything exists within their service. I have thousands of albums that are not available in the Apple Music library, only on my personal collection.