Itunes 11.1 deleted almost all of my music! WHY?

Upgrading iTunes won't fix the problem of missing media files.

If they are on the hard drive reconnect them to the library.

If backed up, restore from backup.

If they on a device, restore from the device.

If these are purchases from the store, redownload,

If they are CD rips, rerip.

An undelete tool might recover lost files. FreeRecover looks promising...

Whatever you manage to do, back it up.

tt2

I am having the same problems as Nephilimx1973. I have installed song with higher bit rate, but those songs do not seem to get deleted.

{Post unhiding post, please ignore}

tt2

I'm having the same problem; songs from albums and playlists showing on screen, but now many are grey'd out and unplayable.

Also, I find the tenor of TT2's responses, that the users should do the heavy lifting for what is clearly an Apple issue, to be unhelpful. If ones collection is 100-200 songs, perhaps the type of advice TT2 is giving makes sense, but for anyone with a substantial library, it is both; unfeasible and wrongly focussed. This seems more like it relates to Apple's new DRM terms than something technical, and I'd like to hear from somebody who has an actual answer to why so many people seem to behaving this problem and what is being done to let us hear our music.

I think you misunderstand my intent. Regardless of the exact circumstances that have led to data loss Apple just isn't in a position to reach out and undo whatever has been done. Only the end user has the ability to restore any backup that they might have, or find a tool to recover their data from their devices, or their hard drives. If there is an issue with the software that can be identified then reporting this back to Apple via feedback or bug reporting channels is great, and in time should stop the same things from happening to others, but it still won't fix things for anyone who has lost data now. I've made a number of practical suggestions in this thread already. I can't answer the question as to exactly why you might have lost media but if it is still on your computer somewhere I have tools or suggestions that will help reconnect it to the library, or I can go into more detail about how to use the other approaches.

From what you have said so far I'd repeat what I wrote to Nephilimx1973

Select a broken track in the library. Press CTRL+I to Get Info. Say no when prompted to locate the track. Look at the bottom of the summary tab for where iTunes thinks the file should be. Please post back the path as given. It will begin file://localhost/ and end with the filename of the track. Search the entire computer for a file with that same filename. If found where is it?

tt2

TT2, I'm compelled to publically admit two things; I am gratified by your promptness in replying and your conscientiousness in tone - thank you - sincerely, thank you. This makes participating in these forums more enjoyable.

Separately from this sentiment, I do stand by my first post/comment on your replies. My circumstances may be unique (I have a 119,000 +/- song library - I'm in the biz) but there is NO WAY in the world I am going to go through those steps for EACH & EVERY greyed out song. Many of the songs in question, I purchased in iTunes. This is NOT a tech problem on my end – nor is it for many of the other posters, I imagine - this is an Apple Business Unit decision and they MUST have or be working hard on a solution to this by now, right?!?

I'm not suggesting you manually reconnect every missing track. The aim behind this bit:

Select a broken track in the library. Press CTRL+I to Get Info. Say no when prompted to locate the track. Look at the bottom of the summary tab for where iTunes thinks the file should be. Please post back the path as given. It will begin file://localhost/ and end with the filename of the track. Search the entire computer for a file with that same filename. If found where is it?

is to do some differential diagnosis. The information from one missing track would help me understand your problem better. Is the media really missing from your computer, or just not where iTunes is currently looking for it? If it is the latter I may have a fix that requires that you make a one character edit to a text file to fix everything. Or perhaps a drive letter has changed in which case I can explain how to fix that. Or I might want to suggest a couple of simple folder actions that need to take place and knowing the names of the folders involved means I can give you the correct advice. Or if the easy solutions won't work but the tracks are in sensible Artist & Album folders in some common location then my FindTracks script should be able to reconnect them to iTunes. FindTracks uses some fuzzy matching routines and searches for multiple potential locations. For more details see this thread.

With the number of tracks in your library it is obvious that you won't have a device that contains them all, but for those that do the user tip Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device (which is referenced within my first link) describes how to restore lost files from a device. This will normally require a third party tool to systematically extract all the media from the device.

If the files have truly been deleted from the hard drive, and you've no other backup, then recovering from the drive using a file recovery tool may be the last resort. In the past I've used FileRecovery from Seagate ($99) to recover some crucial video files from a friend's 500Gb hard drive that suddenly decided it was completely empty. From a fairly brief test it seems FreeRecover can do the same task, if not so elegantly, for the low low cost of free. Provided that the area of the drive that a file occupied hasn't yet been used then it is usually possible to recover a copy of the data. The scanning and recovery processes take time, but don't require constant manual input. What you are likely to need is a new drive to restore the data to or you may damage files that could have been recovered.

Songs that have been purchased from iTunes can be redownloaded from the store if they can't be restored in any other fashion. If the entry for the song still exists in iTunes then it will assume you have it, even if the link is broken. To recover these the entries need to be deleted first (without removing from iTunes in the Cloud). Then, after closing and reopening iTunes, it should be possible to redownload from iTunes Store > Quicklinks > Purchased > Music > Not on this computer > All songs > Download all.

Without understanding more clearly what has happened to your system it isn't yet clear what has gone wrong for you. The inital problem I addressed in this thread when the library file is corrupted following an upgrade is relatively common, though still rare in real numbers terms. Apple could redesign iTunes so that it was able to detect that something had gone wrong and automatically apply the fix I suggest (which is the same as one they suggest here) but they haven't yet chosen to do so. For more obscure issues where files might go missing I cannot be certain that the relevant team at Apple are aware of the problem or indeed how many different issues there might be. I'm vaguely aware of a potential problem when tracks are downsampled when put on a device but I'm basing this on anecdotal evidence in a few threads. It isn't something I've successfully reproduced. Without knowing more it isn't clear if iTunes is actually at fault in such cases or if some other issue could be the cause such as corrupted file operations which would be attributed to Windows or the drive itself rather than iTunes.

tt2

Message was edited by: turingtest2

OK So I'm having the same problem and its ******* me off. I literally just updated itunes to 11.1 and got ios 7.0.3 and now all of a sudden my songs wont play and just disappeared from my ipod (5th gen). They show up on itunes but theyre gone from my ipod. Makes no sense. The exclamation point is next to every song that doesn't play. Ive had this problem before with the exclamation point, but itunes would give me the option to locate the file and I'd just go to the folder with all my music click the song and it would locate all the missing files. Now the main problem is, Itunes doesnt even give me that option. i dont know what to do SOMEONE PLEASE HELP.

I am having the same problem as well. Updated to Mavericks, iTunes 11.1.2, and iOS 7.0.3. I backed up my iPod touch 5g yesterday and all of a sudden about 22 GB worth of music just disappeared. I cannot even get the music back on my iPod without doing one song at a time and it taking over 10 minutes to do so. It is definietly a problem with one of the updates, and is very frustrating. iTunes will just spin its color wheel when attempting to put more than one song on (most of the times, it has done the smae with one song as well), and then it freezes up and I have to force quit. I have had to perform this force quit at least a dozen times in the last couple days. I called Apple Support earlier and they walked me thru some basic stuff and I did get multiple tracks to copy to my iPod but have had the same problem since. Not all of the songs deleted are downloaded files, some are from my CD library I burned in some years ago. The files are still on my computer and can play in iTunes, but will not copy to my iPod without taking forever or freezing iTunes.

It's not a file or computer issue, it is an iTunes or iOS problem. ANYBODY HAVE ANY SUGGESTIONS?

I'm having the same problem as the guy above me. My iPod touch 5g updated to 7.0.3 yesterday and I updated itunes to 11.1.2 today and suddenly I have exclamation points on all of my songs when I connect my ipod to the computer and it goes through an endless shuffle on the device that won't play a single song; my music was working just fine yesterday and I've never had this problem before. I thought it was safe from removing songs but a recent check showed that I too am losing media over this. I've tried backing up and restoring, I even switched out previous libraries - nothing is working.

I really hope this is an Apple problem and I hope it will be fixed soon and can save what's left of my music. It's such a pain replacing all of this.

I spent a few hours on the phone with Apple yesterday trying to resolve this issue and to make a long story short, it turn out I had to do a full restore of my ipod and set it up as a new ipod rather than restore from backup. While at first it seemed like there may be an issue with iTunes or my USB ports, we resolved that it wasn't and that it was in fact my ipod software that somehow got corrupted. My wife has a fairly new iphone 5C that seems to be running alright with the newest updates and transfering music to her device manually, however she has not had any music on it until yesterday. But I could not even get my Mac to recognize her iphone until updating it to iOS 7.0.3. Once I did that it connected fine.

After resoring as a new ipod, the manual adding of music to it works as it has in the past, no lag like before and it hasn't caused iTunes to freeze up.

If you are having the same problem that I had (updated iTunes, OSX and ipod to the newest versions and then lost a ton of music files for no reason) I would recommend initiating a case with Apple online and then contact them via phone. I think there definitely was/is an issue with all the new updates that did not like the ipod 5g software, maybe due to the fact that the 5g was initially put out before iOS 7? I don't know the reason or answer, but I do know that after the restore it has been working fine, and I will continue to update here for a while.

One other interesting note, once I did restore, some of the apps that I use recently had a bit differerent look to them. It seems like maybe some of them did not fully update or look like the iOS 7 versions previuosly, but now I have noticed they do. Strange? Maybe the initial iOS 7 update was a bit buggy?

It was a shame to have to restore as a new deivce, that's why I back my device up every month, but it beats having a corrupted device. I have gotten into the habit of using playlists a lot to add music and hopefully this will be the end of the issue with the all the new OS for a while.

Are you having an issue with music in your iTunes library on a computer or on an ipod? As a few of us below have chimed in, we have had issues with files being deleted from our ipods (typically 5g models). I have had to restore my ipod as a new deive to get this remedied. If you are having the issue with your computer iTunes library, that would seem like either an iTunes issue or OSX issue if you are on a Mac. Do you have a Mac and Mavericks installed?

I have a PC with Windows 7 64-bit and I'm having an issue with music on both iTunes and my iPod. I don't have any music in my actual iTunes library, I usually play what's from my iPod once it's connected. But now it won't play any of the songs - an exclaimation point shows up next to any song I click. I thought maybe it was just iTunes, but when I try to play those same songs on the iPod itself it goes through an endless instant shuffle and deletes them. I also noticed that none of my podcasts will play on the iPod, stating that they're temporarily unavailable, and they don't show up on iTunes either.

I tried doing what TT2 advised, reassigning the location path, but that doesn't show up under get info for the songs. I'm not quite sure what happened, like you said, but I think I'm just going to do a full restore as well.