iTunes losing songs

[briansolomon]

Does your iTunes randomly lose songs that are in the same place as before? Mine does! I keep all my music on an external USB drive but the drive is mounted before I open iTunes. It's been good for a long time now but the problem has cropped up again. Any ideas?

Brian

 

[mad jew]

When you say you lose songs, do you mean you get the little grey exclamation mark next to them when you try to play them or do they simply not appear in your library?

Also, is iTunes set to manage your music files?

 

[iSaint]

I've had a similar issue of late. I, too, am storing my music on an external USB drive. The gray exclamation point will be next to a song, and if I try to play it, it says it can't be found and asks if I want to search for it.

Many times everything will reappear fine if I close iTunes and reopen.

I haven't ever really 'lost' music, only a temporary disappearance.

 

[rockstarjoe]

Similar problem, can someone help?

I have a similar problem. I am new to macs (just got a macbook). I keep all of my music on an Buffalo NAS... there are roughly 22,000 songs on there. I transferred my library from my PC to my macbook by just copying the itunes library.itl file from My Music folder.

Everything seemed to be working fine at first, but soon I started getting the random grey exclamation marks. The problem appears to stem from the iTunes file metadata... if any of the fields are too long iTunes says it can't find the file (even though the PC saw them fine before). So if the song name is too long, or the album title, etc, I get this problem. I have yet to determine exactly "how long" is too long, though, and once I have re-linked the songs they play fine and iTunes never has the problem with that particular song again.

Now I'm trying to go through my Library and fix the problematic songs, but I was hoping someone out there might have run into this issue before and could offer me some advice. Also, is there any way to have iTunes "scan" your library to check all of the links? Sometimes it doesn't realize that it can't find a song until I actually try to play it... so it is hard for me to even find all of the problematic songs right now. And with such a huge library, clicking every track will be impossible.

 

[Tom B.]

Doug's Apple Scripts

Rockstarjoe, you should try Doug's Apple Scripts (http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/)

I cannot find it right now, but one of the scripts plays every track in iTunes for less than a second, so you will be able to find all of the tracks with the ! next to them.
Also there are loads of other things on there that will probably help you solve your iTunes related problems.

 

[rockstarjoe]

Rockstarjoe, you should try Doug's Apple Scripts (http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/)

I cannot find it right now, but one of the scripts plays every track in iTunes for less than a second, so you will be able to find all of the tracks with the ! next to them.
Also there are loads of other things on there that will probably help you solve your iTunes related problems.

Ah, thanks! I forgot about that site.