WTF iTunes?

September 10, 2006 10:07 AM

Disappearing MusicFilter

I've been using iTunes to organize my music collection only to find that certain songs are disappearing seemingly at random. I had complete albums but now some of the files are missing. The songs were still listed in the library but with the little exclamation point saying the files could not be found. So I go cruising through my music folder and sure enough, they're gone. Where did they go and why?

Its more irritating than anything as I am just anal enough to only want full albums in my library.

posted by LunaticFringe to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Files dispparing at random can be indicative of hard-disk trouble. To be honest I doubt this is the problem in your case, but running a scan cannot hurt.
posted by ed\26h at 10:20 AM on September 10, 2006

This won't help, but it's happened to me. And my sister. On stable machines with no other problems, with no explanation, no software crash before the songs disappeared. Me on a Mac, her on a PC. I lost most (but not all) of the tracks from the Garden State soundtrack (and everything else was fine), she lost tracks from the first several artists starting with the letter "A." Annoying as hell, eh?
posted by katieinshoes at 10:33 AM on September 10, 2006

Response by poster: I am also on a Mac. I don't have any other symptoms of a crappy hard-disk but will run a scan tonight just to be safe.

I lost my whole collection of Cowboy Bebop OSTs and one song by the Prodigy. There were a few others but I can't remember now. It is definitly irritating and also the first time I've been mad at my Mac. Thanks for the answers so far!
posted by LunaticFringe at 10:37 AM on September 10, 2006

A few, much older versions of iTunes would 'forget' where songs were for me sometimes (this would be about 2+ years ago). I'd have the songs listed in the library but would have the ! listed in front of them, and if I tried to play them, I'd be required to re-select them in their directory. It was really quite odd that, say, nine of ten songs on an album would be found, but the tenth song, which would just be sitting there in the directory alongside the others, 'couldn't' be found unless I manually steered the application in that direction. I don't think that I made any hard drive changes and took it for granted that some more recent version of iTunes fixed that glitch. It may very well be that I rebuilt the entire library around that point and have since forgotten. You might want to run some HDD diagnostics then rebuild your library file. Google around--as I recall, there's a way to rebuild the library and have iTunes remember playlists, last played information, ratings, and so forth.
posted by kimota at 2:37 PM on September 10, 2006

I and another mac-using friend have been plagued by this problem since the inception of iTunes. We haven't been able to figure it out either-- when I've called applecare in the past they've said, "Gee we never heard of that before! I'll tell our engineers!" and that's the end of that. It would greatly surprise me if the iTunes people weren't aware of this problem already. Only solution at the moment? Backup your hard drive! (Harder when you have 30 days' worth of music to safeguard... I use an iPod, my friend uses her other apple PLUS an external hard drive just to be safe.)
posted by Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson at 8:10 PM on September 10, 2006

Hi, just like to point out that this has begun to happen to me. iBook G4, after a period of kernel panics and a subsequent OS re-install with archive backup. I just tried to play "Civil War", G&R, and it's gone-poof. It would be awesome if someone had an answer.

What's so civil 'bout iTunes anyway...
posted by Kwine at 3:25 PM on December 6, 2006

Oh, wonderful. It's happening again to me... ARRGH.
posted by dmaterialized at 9:49 PM on December 25, 2006