Tuesday, January 20, 2009

iTunes and the disappearing music library

I was just wondering if anyone else has been experiencing problems with iTunes like the problems I've had recently. It's not exactly earth shattering, but the only solution I found (as yet not fully tested) was quite drastic.

Anyway, I'm running iTunes 8 on my iMac and all my music is on an external hard drive. A week or maybe two ago, I noticed that one or two songs had become lost to iTunes. The files were still there, but iTunes couldn't locate them. I've been using the new genius system for selecting music, and one or two songs were not playing.

Yesterday I plugged my ipod in to recharge it and sync it and realised that it wasn't one or two songs, but whole albums were "missing". Over 100 songs could not be located and that was just from the list I have on my ipod.

The once simply task of relocating the file had now grown to a major project. In the end, the only solution that seems to have worked is to delete the iTunes library and then open iTunes and add all the stored music back into a new library. All the playlists are lost of course and I haven't tried synchronising my ipod yet.

I couldn't see any reason why iTunes would do this. I haven't moved any files around. 

Anyway, if anyone has had the same problem I was just wondering if you'd found a more elegant solution. I had a look around a few of the usual help sites, but couldn't find a similar iTunes 8 problem.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I synced my I phone up and had a crash...it just froze up and I had to return to OG configurations. Sucked...anyways when I finally got it up and running and resynced, etc, I nothiced that songs were missing off of My phone. i checked me itunes library onmy PC and the songs were still listed but when cled to play, anderror message appeared that these files could not be found. its like they were wiped off my computer hard drive. i've done searches, etc. No Luck...I am very confused and confused about all of this!

Richard said...

Hi Peter

That's interesting and probably quite annoying in equal parts. Don't anything about iphone problems, but others will undoubtedly chip in if they have anything useful to share.

Assuming you get the little exclamation mark to identify a missing song in a playlist, then I solved this by getting iTunes to look for the file. On a Mac you control click, probably right click on a PC, then choose get info. From there you can look in your library for the missing file. all my files were there it was just that itunes had lost the locations somehow.

In the end I rebuilt my entire library as I said in the post.