iTunes ate my music and puked it all out again

June 21, 2007 9:25 AM

iTunes ate my music and spit it out all over the place.

Yesterday iTunes (iBook G4) worked fine. Among other things, I played Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker. No problems. Today, I tried to play the same album and iTunes either played nothing at all, or it played other songs in my library instead. The artwork for the album was gone too. I closed iTunes and tried to access the songs manually off of the (external) hard drive. The files themselves were moved and renamed as well. A significant chunk of my library exhibited the same behavior.

I have a backup, so it's not a huge loss, but I'd like to know what happened. I've searched elsewhere; this is the closest anything comes to describing my problem, but it's not exactly the same and I don't use Quicksilver.

posted by smorange to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

What were they moved and renamed to? Did you install or change anything on your ibook at all yesterday?
posted by loiseau at 10:36 AM on June 21, 2007

Response by poster: The files were apparently moved and renamed randomly. E.g. in iTunes and on the hard drive, what's supposed to be Ryan Adams' "Oh My Sweet Carolina," when you actually play it (in iTunes, Quicktime, and Songbird), is Albert King's "Blues Power." But the filename and the metadata says that it's "OMSC."

I didn't install anything yesterday.
posted by smorange at 10:54 AM on June 21, 2007

I really, really wish iTunes had a "rebuild library" option. It's kind of dumb that they don't include the ability to re-scan the iTunes directory and correct errors such as missing songs, etc.

Every other media library app I've ever used incorporates this kind of function.
posted by caution live frogs at 3:28 PM on June 21, 2007

Best answer: For posterity: turned out my hard drive was dying.
posted by smorange at 11:43 PM on July 22, 2007