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Unchecked songs being deleted from playlist

I have a playlist of large audio files which I sync selectively to my iPhone 5C (iOS8.4) from iTunes as they eat up massive amounts of disk space. To do this, I check and uncheck the files I want in iTunes, leaving the unchecked ones alone until I want to sync them to my phone. This worked perfectly well until the new iTunes update (12.2). Now the unchecked songs keep getting removed from the playlist on my Mac. I've re-added them to the playlist, but when I restart my computer, POOF, they're gone again. This has happened twice now--I assumed the first time was a weird bug due to updating, but the second time, not so much.


Help?


I'm using Mac OS X 10.10.4, iTunes 12.2, and iOS 8.4 as stated.

Posted on Jul 8, 2015 6:08 PM

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4 replies

Sep 1, 2015 6:18 PM in response to Kari Wallace

At last I am not alone on this problem.... spent 1 day adding songs back to assigned playlist from the main iTunes Music list.

Then after syncing, playlist gets duplicated and then the unchecked songs on certain playlist is...POOF gone! only the checked ones remain! whew!!!


Used iTunes for so long because it keeps my songs & playlist organized but after this recent update...things got bad to worst!

I hope people from Apple is taking this seriously...please fix this.

May 9, 2016 9:36 AM in response to Kari Wallace

I spoke with Apple Support yesterday to find out a little more about this issue. After spending close to a month organizing and editing my music on iTunes with the help of playlists, I went to sync my iPod touch 6 for the first time. Although the sync completed successfully I recognized that I had duplicates of playlists on my iTunes as well as all unchecked songs had disappeared. The tech had suggested this information as to why this happens:


1. Duplicate playlists are products of playlist creation on a device during a sync and sending that playlist back to iTunes. The renaming of "Running Music" to "Running Music1" is because iTunes on my PC is detecting a playlist on my iPod...which was just sent from my PC. This seems like poor engineering and a glitch to me, but I'm not a computer science person. It was recommended to me that I should delete the duplicate playlist from my iTunes.

2. The disappearance of unchecked songs on my playlists was explained to me in the same way. Since I only have checked songs uploaded to my iPod, when the information is shared back with my PC it alters the playlists on my computer. This seems like a pretty significant flaw for anyone who would like unchecked songs available for play on their iTunes Player. The way it was described to me was that due to how playlists are processed (a singular unit) unchecked songs could corrupt playlists and that it was iTunes filters these out and erases them from your playlists on iTunes. Until this is rectified, I'm avoiding doing any traditional music management using the playlists.

May 11, 2016 10:57 AM in response to TheOldRepublic7

Thank you for sharing this. I have been grappling with this bug (and yes, it is absolutely a bug) ever since iTunes 12.2 was released. Syncing my iPhone 6 (iOS 9.3.1) with iTunes (12.3.3) on my Windows 10 PC results in exactly the problem you've described: all unchecked songs are deleted from playlists in iTunes that exist on the iPhone. I'm puzzled that there aren't more reports of this issue, but perhaps it's only experienced by users with large enough libraries to actually need to check/uncheck tracks prior to syncing their devices.


This is absolutely a relatively new problem (though I'm not certain whether it was caused by an update on the iTunes side or the iOS side). I have been a very active user of iTunes in conjunction with a multitude of i-devices for over 10 years and have been consistently using the check/uncheck feature in iTunes to manage music synchronization. Until iTunes 12.2, I never saw this problem.


In order for synchronization to work, the i-device and iTunes need to come to an agreement as to which one has the latest version of a given playlist. This is fundamental to any kind of content synchronization framework (contacts, calendars, notes, etc). For example, in the past if you were to make an update to one of your playlists on your mobile device, the next time you synced with iTunes iTunes would recognize that the version on the iPhone had been updated more recently, and would overwrite its own version with the iPhone's version. What seems to be happening here is that even if *no* changes are made to the playlists on the iPhone side, when iTunes looks at them it somehow comes to the conclusion that they are newer and overwrites its own copies. I think this is the gist of it, although I wonder if the problem is actually slightly more complex than that, because what if in the past you were to add songs to a playlist on the fly on your mobile device and then sync later on? Would the process then have also deleted unchecked songs from iTunes' local playlists? I'm not sure about this. I tried to roll back to an earlier version of iTunes to test this (and to verify that the problem was indeed introduced in iTunes 12.2), however I got an error message that my iTunes library file was not compatible with earlier versions of iTunes.


I'd love to hear if anyone else has gotten more feedback from Apple on this issue (or found workarounds on their own, other than simply avoiding this increasingly awful piece of software).

Unchecked songs being deleted from playlist

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