iTunes losing track of file locations

See Make a split library portable. Keep it all in the right shape, and keep a backup.

tt2

I only have about 2500 songs and it is my greatest frustration. I have spent hours deleting duplicates, double-clicking on tracks which are located, but aren't located again the next time I sign on. I still don't really understand what keeps changing. I had a base library that I created many years ago where the files were all in the Itunes folder. Theoretically, as I load more CD's or buy songs from Itunes, my library is populated and Itunes stores those files in the same folder as the others. When the icloud stuff started is when my library really got f---ed up. All of my music files won't fit in the 5GB they give you anyway, but I think part of them are being saved there and the other part of them are not, which may be causing the disconnect in my file location. I have no idea though, so keep using TouchCopy to reload my library from my phone back to my computer and then the cleanup starts again. Sigh.

How unfortunate are we! I too started having this issue for TV shows only, not on movies nor music. I too just installed a WD Cloud NAS and this is when this problem started. I wonder why though it only occurs with the first episode of the first season of each TV show stored on the same NAS. My movies are on the same drive but they don't lose file location. Losing the file location only occurs after a restart.

Mac (27-inch, Mid 2011), macOS High Sierra 10.13, iTunes 12.7.0.166

I wonder if whipping out the current library and creating anew might resolve this funk?

Anyone have any suggestions for us to try?

Thanks in advance.

Does anyone else see this type of consistent issues with iTunes losing track of individual files?

Sure, I have read about it multiple times on this forum over the past decade or so. No, nobody has come up with a solution involving keeping the files on a networked server. In fact nobody has ever really worked on why this is happening, but since I don't have a NAS I'll just wait for you guys. 🙂

I have the same problem and my iTunes is located on the second internal disk on my iMac. I thought I had some files go missing initially but they may have not. Caused some confusion on iTunes purchases in that I would download them again and end up with 2 files for the same song. Now I realise that the files are there and just need to be relocated. This happens almost on a daily basis. You used to be able to reindex iTunes but that disappeared years ago. I would love to hear Apple's explanation as to why. The last really good version was 10.6.3 of which I still have an installation DMG. I wonder if it's possible to remove the latest iTunes and go back to it?

Helpful article at http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/ITunes_Music_Library