iTune "lost" more than 400 songs during the last upgrade

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Level 1

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iTune "lost" more than 400 songs during the last upgrade

After the upgrade to iTunes 12.1.2 i found that more than 400 songs where lost. I found back some and iTunes found others automatically after i found some locations but it's a pretty tedious and long process. Is there some easier way to do so than going song by song? I still have more than 100 to find.

Also, when I buy a new CD I put it in my DVD reader to upload it to iTunes. Why does iTunes never put the albums at the same places? I have albums under iTunes, others under my music and some are split a few songs at a place and other songs elsewhere, I can't find a logical process that would help me find back the lost songs. Why not put all albums at the same place under a logical structure by band/artist, album and songs. iTunes seems so much made for people that buy songs individually online that it is a complete mess for people who still buy whole albums (CD) and then import it in iTunes.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

PS : It didn't happen lately but iTunes often lost songs without any reason, upgrade or anything else, really annoying,,,

PPS : I work in IT and I'm very prudent to not do anything that could have moved the files or renamed the path by accident so iTunes would have lost them. I really think it's a bug not a user mistake.

iPhone 4S, Windows 7

Posted on Apr 18, 2015 7:49 AM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

272,749 points

Apr 18, 2015 7:57 AM in response to Altair_sd

Some boilerplate to start with...

The "missing file" error happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, one of its parent folders, or the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place. (In the case of a library moved from one system to another there are also potential permissions issues. See Repair security permissions for iTunes for Windows if this might apply.)

Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to Get Info, then click No when asked to try to locate the track. (Due to a bug in iTunes 12 you currently have to say No twice!) Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, a folder renamed, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. If the difference between the two paths is an additional Music folder in one path then this is a layout issue. I can explain further if that is the case.

In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. Although it says something like "use the same location" it expects to find the tracks in the same artist & album layout that it generates, not all in one big folder.

If another application like Windows Media Player has moved/renamed the files then the chances are that subtle differences in naming strategies will make it hard to restore the media to the precise path that iTunes is expecting. In such cases, as long as the missing files can be found somewhere, you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes. See this post for an explanation of how it works.

If you have some content up in the main user's Music folder then WMP may well be a factor in your issues. See Getting iTunes & Windows Media Player to play nicely for some background.

tt2

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