Locating multiple missing songs

Hi jbortz22,

Thanks for visiting Apple Support Communities.

The steps in this article can help with finding missing songs in iTunes:

iTunes: Finding lost media and downloads

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1408

Regards,

Jeremy

Select a broken track and press CTRL+I to Get Info. Say no when prompted to locate the track, then look at the location given on the Summary tab that begins file://localhost/. Now look for the true location of the same file. Post back both paths and I can suggest the most efficient way to fix things.

tt2

Hey turingtest2,

I too have lost ALL my itunes song on an old iMac running OS 10.4.11 and iTunes 9.1.1. EVERY song I click on it tells me it cannot locate it. When I follow the stated path under "Get Info", the song title does not show up. The above article is of little use as nothing is showing up in the pathway that it suggests. Can you help?

Do you not see something that begins file://localhost/ on the summary tab?

tt2

Yes, here is a typical pathway I get:

file://localhost/Users/twill/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Garth Brooks/Garth Brooks/11 The Dance.mp3

yet when I manually follow that pathway I get as far as iTunes Media and there is no folder entitled Garth Brooks.

So where is the Garth Brooks folder? Spotlight ought to be able to find it for you.

tt2

Spotlight returns: No Results Found

When in fact there IS a Garth Brooks folder ... but it ONLY contains ONE song which is a song with a unique name (DIxie) that Spotlight managed to find. But it doesn't find others and doesn't even recognize the Garth Brooks folder when in fact I have over 100 Garth Brooks songs.

OK, but where are they? If they're not on your computer, or a backup, then it looks like you're in trouble. Are they on a device at all? Did anything significant happen before you noticed this problem?

tt2

That's my question, where are they? I can't figure it out. I rarely use this computer. It has not had anything significant happen to it yet my music seems to have disappeared. I can find random songs in spotlight and they'll all of a sudden and magically show up in the media folder but that doesn't happen to every song. With close to 5000 songs I really don't want to spotlight check every one. Very frustrating....

Do you have a Time Machine backup of the iTunes folders?

tt2

Unfortunately no. Old machine, old OS. But it makes no sense that some songs will randomly materialize and others will not. At this point they are ALL invisible except for the two I have found with Spotlight. They're there ... somewhere, but my system is just not recognizing them.

I hope you are right, but I've seen a worrying number of posts that suggest that in some cases iTunes is discarding files.

tt2

WHAT! Discarding files! How could it do that and why would it do that?

How is easy enough, but why is beyond my ken. It cannot be intentional, but it is hard to conceive what kind of bug might be responsible either. I just know that I see the occasional post where people complain that their original media has gone missing. 😟

Hardware & software can both fail which is why you really ought to maintain a backup of your data.

tt2