Korean HTML replacing my iTunes music?!?

Ok, now this is just weird... I was looking for tracks on my iPod that I knew I had and couldn't find. Got home, found them in iTunes and tried to play them but iTunes quietly refused.

Went to the library on disk and found that the songs had been changed to an html extension. Opened a few of them up in Safari and they're Korean language help files for iLife apps... A co-worker translated them for me.

Same song name, same creation date (Nov 2005), different extension, Korean contents. No sign of the music any longer.

Huh?

I just did a search through my library, and it looks like there's 126 of them right now. I'm going to keep track to see if it's spreading.

iTunes complains when I sync my iPod that it's not transferring files because iPod can't play them. When I first saw this error, I looked into the library and found a bunch of .NIB files that I deleted and just figured I hadn't gotten them all. I don't know where those came from either, but I figured I'd just dragged something to the wrong place accidently or something-- now I'm not so sure.

Seems so deliberate though if it's keeping the song names-- it's not like it added files, it changed them.

Anybody have any idea what could have caused this? Fixing this will be a pain, but I'm more worried about my photo libraries...

bousozoku said:

Have you been running a defragmentation application?

Click to expand...

Nope.

I haven't completely ruled out file system corruption here but it seems unlikely because the file names match the song names, but the extensions have changed. If I was finding the wrong file in the wrong place, or if the file name was unchanged but the content was bad, then I'd think it was a corruption problem.

It just seems too organized to be corrupt-- it almost looks like it was scripted...

bousozoku said:

The only other idea I have is something pirated (software or music or graphic) or even inexpensive or free software written by an untrustworthy developer.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of-- I don't know where something like that is hiding... Other option is that it's a well intentioned script somewhere that lost its mind. Don't know where to look for that either...

I haven't heard about anything like this hitting anyone else though-- this thread hasn't hit any nerves, for example. If it was malware, I'd expect them to do better than iLife help pages.

I keep hoping someone will jump in and link to another example of this.