iTunes Match deleted songs from my hard drive. I had to re-rip them. How can I stop this from happening?

It DOES happen. After doing another "match" on iTunes Match, some of the songs my ripped CDs deleted. There was a grey shadow that the song had been there at one point, but the song was missig from the path. And I know that it was there at one point in the last month because I ripped the whole CD. I am not computer illiterate, and yes, this bug does affect files.

I joined Itunes match last week and low and behold all my ripped cds that were in my library have been deleted. The only music available to be played are my Itunes store purchases. Thats only 835 songs from a library of 7205 songs. the whole lot have been deleted form my HDD. Does anybopdy know if there is anyway to recover the library??

Cheers

I have the same problem. Signed up for match and all of my ripped music and music that I had purchased using a different account all dissappeared from my iPhone. Lost over 500 songs. Very upset.

I actually found this post in my search for what happened to my library and how to get it back. I had the same thing happen to me. I had all of my music in a DropBox folder on my computer. That folder was a "backup" of my music. It had music that I ripped from CDs years ago (I learned after my first computer crashed with all my music that I need to have a backup stored elsewhere-hence DropBox) as well as downloaded music from iTunes that I'd purchased. I turned on iTunes Match on my MacBook Pro, A few weeks later, my newly purchased Mac Mini arrived. I installed DropBox and went to download my music from my music folder on DropBox because I was going to use my Mac Mini to store my media locally instead of my MacBook Pro. When I accessed my Music folder on DropBox, the folder was empty! I checked in the trash and everything and my music was nowhere. Not only that but a BUNCH of my songs are mismatched/have wrong meta data/have single albums split into 2 or 3 (with only a few songs on each). I want to get rid of iTunes Match and start over (cause I only use iTunes for new music purchases-I just want my previously ripped music back) but I can't.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one having the music deletion issue. I don't expect an answer or resolution, just wanted to add my "me too!" so all the people who've commented and said it can't happen can see that it actually does.

OMG It's amazing. But yours is worse because your dropbox got deleted too. I am going to go to Genius bar and I am going to bring this post with me to show them. I found an old computer--old G4 laptop with cracked screen that I just stored and forgot about-- and I have tons of music from that one on thumb drive. But I think I will follow your advice and turn off iTunes Match first. Close the portole to the black hole!

Luckily I was overly paranoid about losing all that music after it happened to me years ago and also had my DropBox folder uploading my music to my Google Music acount so I'm currently re-downloading the music to my computer from there - but I've bought some music on iTunes since then so I will have to compare and see what's still not showing up and re-download from iTunes.

Oh that's smart. I don't even have a google music account. I need to set that up. Right now. I have carbonite now. And drop box back ups.

i have a similar predicament but i don't use match. i simply updated itunes and all of my music, except for the music i purchased from itunes was gone (everything that i ripped). the folders are still actually still on the hard drive but they're all empty.

it's a shame; as if itunes treats music you didn't purchase from them as pirated. fortunately, i have all the actual cd's as i still like to listen to cds. however, they shouldn't delete any item from my hard drive. while i don't know that they did, how do you explain that my itunes-purchased music is still available?

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem.

I ripped all my music to a usb HDD and have used with no problems for a couple of weeks.

I play music via remote on an ipad through a Mac Mini. I don't have Itunes Match switched on.

For some reason selected songs would not play through Remote on the Ipad.

I have looked at the library on the Mac Mini and see that the files cannot be located.

On examining the HDD i see that the files have actually disappeared.

Nobody has touched or accessed the Mac Mini other than via the Remote App on the Ipad.

So why have the files gone?

Where have they gone?

Is this a problem with Apple?

Someone please help. Fortunately i have my music library backed up on a Windows computer in Flac so can do a batch conversion again but it don't want to be faced with this probelm again.

Regards,

Nick

I should also say that i have the console running if that will provide any clues as to what has happened although i cannot interpret the date.

Regards,

Nick

A further update.

It looks as though itunes or some other part of Apple system decided to move 768 music files to .Trashes on the external hard drive...Why?

Regards,

Nick

How do we move the music back from the .Trashes folder into a safe place?

I am a composer so many hundreds (thousands?) of my music files are versions of my own compositions, not ripped from commercial CDs. Of course some of them are released and sold on the iTunes store, but the versions I had on the hard drive were drafts, sketches, versions saved in various file formats and encoding for different purposes (promotional, clips, etc.)

I've just dragged a bunch to a playlist to burn to CD and was messaged that I can't burn music to CD if it isn't on my hard drive... why wasn't it on my hard drive? It was there before I turned on Match!

I may need to use Time Machine backups to get my music back... I hope I will find it all....

BTW I'm using iTunes 10.7 (21) on one computer.

I also have a laptop which contains many versions of my songs as well (duplicates or near duplicates or renamed or re-tagged files)..

I may have had a misunderstanding about the way the system works and how to use it. I am still new to Match.

It looks like I dragged in a file -- which had been copied to iCloud from the laptop -- to the playlist I meant to burn via the desktop CD drive... THAT file wasn't on the desktop ...a dupe of that WAV with a slightly different filename was on the desktop, outside the iTunes Music folder.

So that message when burning the CD was most likely correct... and I've similar "oops, I do have a copy of that -- it wasn't deleted" moments as I examine things closer.

Some people seem to have things actually deleted.

But for some of us finding this thread, we might just need to look more closely at how our music was saved and named before Match, to make sense of our newly combined collection.

I've had things deleted from my hard drive as well. And I've just noticed those tracks were all from burned copies of CDs. Prior to getting rid of the originals, I made copies to make sure I had backup, then imported them as Apple Lossless. Then after activating Match, all of those ALAC files were deleted and replaced by 256kpb versions from the iTunes store.

kpa272 wrote:

Then after activating Match, all of those ALAC files were deleted and replaced by 256kpb versions from the iTunes store.

Not in your iTunes library it didn't. Nothing in your iTunes library is automatically replaced by matched files unless you specifically delete the tracks then download the matched tracks. If you mean on an iOS device, then, yes, this is expected behavior. When lossless files are processed they are either matched to 256 Kbps AAC files from the iTunes store, or, in the case of being uploaded, a temporary 256 Kbps AAC file is created to be uploaded. But nothing happens to the file that is in the iTunes library.