...and all that remained was Journey.

November 27, 2006 7:41 AM

ITunes is slowly eating my music library. This is happening gradually, a few dozen songs at a time, but as surely as the humble Colorado River carved the mighty Grand Canyon, so too will the topsoil of my music collection disappear.

I'm using the latest update of iTunes, along with the most recent update of tiger. As my music collection is too large for my internal HDD, it is being stored on an external HP drive. My music collection is about 14,000 songs (and dwindling!), totaling about 52 Gig (and shrinking!)

I'm not opposed to getting a new drive, but this one is a year old and sees very little use (I only plug it in when I update my library, my iPod does 95% of the work). The drive exhibits no suspicious behaviour.

Every time I plug in my drive and fire up iTunes, my song list is lightly peppered with those awful exclamation points. Most of the time it is one or two tracks off of an album, but sometimes a whole album gets sucked into the memory hole.

Anyone have any ideas of any (non-failing drive) causes of this?

posted by sourwookie to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

So are the files themselves missing, or not?
posted by cillit bang at 8:02 AM on November 27, 2006

I had the same problem and even posted an AskMe about it. I didn't get a satisfactory answer and wound up redownloading the albums iTunes had eaten. It took a while.
posted by LunaticFringe at 8:05 AM on November 27, 2006

Please don't be offended by what may just be a giant insult to your smart-ness, but I gotta ask: is your hard drive plugged in all the time? Because it needs to be. iTunes needs to access the files directly from the disk. Exclamation points mean it can't find the files. If you say you "only plug it in when [you] update [your] library" ...that might be your problem.
posted by Milkman Dan at 8:06 AM on November 27, 2006

could it be a DRM thing? Exceeding the number of times your allowed to transferred the song already? (just a shot in the dark)
posted by edgeways at 8:07 AM on November 27, 2006

Are you moving the files from somewhere to your external HD after you put them in itunes? If they first live on your desktop, for example, and you subsequently move them to the HD after telling itunes they're on your desktop, the next time itunes tries to find the songs it'll look on your desktop. It of course won't find them, because you've put them on your HD.

Click on the exclamation point, let itunes tell you it can't find the song and ask you if you want to look for it, say "yes", and navigate to the song on your HD, and that should take care of it.
posted by pdb at 8:09 AM on November 27, 2006

@edgeways: It's not DRM.

@sourwookie: What cillit bang said; it sounds like a dying hard drive to me.
posted by awesomebrad at 8:10 AM on November 27, 2006

I had the same problem and it wasn't my harddrive. All scans have turned up nothing except a happy, working harddrive.
posted by LunaticFringe at 8:12 AM on November 27, 2006

Response by poster: Yeah, The files themselves are missing. I browse manually through finder..not there. Use spotlight-nothing.

It's not an issue of moving the files. These are files that have lived in that particular directory for awhile. most of these tracks travalled with the pack for years.

Not DRM. I've had most of these songs for years-most I ripped myself.

Yes, the drive is plugged in whenever I use iTunes. Otherwise the entire library would show up as missing.
posted by sourwookie at 8:28 AM on November 27, 2006

Response by poster: What happens when I run "disk repair" in Disk utiity? It won't erase the volume or anything, will it?
posted by sourwookie at 8:29 AM on November 27, 2006

Response by poster: I swear, I searched! How did I miss that thread?
posted by sourwookie at 8:31 AM on November 27, 2006

[stab in the dark] I wonder if this has something to do with iTunes' "keep organized" feature. You know that iTunes can organize all your tracks into a nice hierarchical folder structure, but it doesn't have to. And if you move your default music folder, it will (I think) remember where your earlier tracks were stored and leave them there, but (perhaps) if you have "keep organized" turned on, it will move them to the new location as you play them.

Since you apparently have two locations for your music, is it possible that it is moving them from where you're looking to the other one? Check File:Preferences:advanced:general for the path to your music. Is that on the drive pulling the disappearing act or the other one? I'm betting it's the other one.

Note that if you want to want to consolidate your library in one place, you need to select the Advanced:Consolidate Library menu item, apart from the "keep organized" option.
posted by adamrice at 9:32 AM on November 27, 2006

I hate to say it, but... this happened to me. Not once but twice. Before, it was VERY clear songs were mysteriously vanishing from the drive -- as well as all record of them having been in iTunes (which is part of what made it bizarre); I assumed this was a bad hard drive in my G4 iMac (which was 3 years old at the time). It SUCKED, and I seemed to only lose stuff I wasn't listening to very often so I never knew when something just wouldn't be there.

It seems to be happening again, on my year-old Powerbook...

and no solution yet found. WTF is with this?
posted by dmaterialized at 1:02 PM on November 27, 2006

I too have had this happen. I have no answers either though.
posted by vagabond at 2:20 PM on November 27, 2006

The obvious thing to me would be to back up all your music to a second hard drive. You can get a 500GB one for less than $200, which is way more than you'd need. When a file "disappears" from your primary hard drive, just import it from the back-up.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 2:39 PM on November 27, 2006

I had the same thing happen to me. I think what happens is iTunes automatically creates a new iTunes Music folder on your internal drive when it can't find the folder on the external. It is still reading the xml file, so it knows what the songs are, just not where they are. Look in the Music folder in your home directory for your lost files. Then try the "consolidate Library" feature to get everything in the right place. I needed to do this periodically as I added more music.
posted by TheCoug at 10:41 PM on November 27, 2006

That's funny, because I've used Winamp for around 8 years and never had that problem. Maybe try not using iTunes?

Seriously - Any program that makes you create a library, when you already have tagged files in directories on your disk, is not to be trusted. This goes for Picasa, too.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 10:28 PM on November 28, 2006

I have seen the same issue as adamrice mentions. If you check the "iTunes Music Library.xml"-file in a proper text editor like Textwrangler or BBEdit, you will see where it believes the location of the file in question to be.

It is likely to happen if you don't have the external drive connected all the time when you have iTunes open.
posted by KimG at 2:44 PM on December 5, 2006