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iTunes Constantly loses files!

M

Mustard Chops

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 15, 2007
118
0
iTunes is losing the location of files at an alarming rate.

I have my library on a 750gb internal and it's total size is 462gb. Everytime i restart iTunes I have a stack of tracks or movies that have the dreaded exclamation mark next to them. I then spend 20 minutes re linking the files :mad:

Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening or any potential fixes?

Cheers ;)
 
Do you have under the Advanced/General tap the "keep iTunes Music folder organized"

Second, are you manually editing the names of your tracks on the iTunes music folder. If your doing that, that would be the obvious reason why iTunes is losing where the tracks are.

Other than that, I'm not sure, but I'm sure someone else will add a post to this to help you out more.

If you could give some more details of what your doing or exactly did to your library when this first started occuring that would help as well.
 
DaftUnion said:
Do you have under the Advanced/General tap the "keep iTunes Music folder organized"

Second, are you manually editing the names of your tracks on the iTunes music folder. If your doing that, that would be the obvious reason why iTunes is losing where the tracks are.

Other than that, I'm not sure, but I'm sure someone else will add a post to this to help you out more.

If you could give some more details of what your doing or exactly did to your library when this first started occuring that would help as well.
Click to expand...

I'm not editing any names in the library, and I do have itunes set to keep the music folder organized.

I have not done anything to my library that should make this happen, it's so weird that iTunes keeps losing the link to so many tracks on a daily basis...
 
I have been suffering through the same maddening experience for the past 2 weeks now. I just got off the phone with Apple Care (waited over a hour and a half just to talk to a rep.) and had no success what so ever. Now I (and support) cannot even find my some of my "purchased music". The only thing that I have done differently the past few weeks was to download "Leopard". Could that have anything to do with this? This is very frustrating and now I cannot get any help from Apple ( I don't ) Care/Support.:mad::confused:
 
KFOG said:
I have been suffering through the same maddening experience for the past 2 weeks now. I just got off the phone with Apple Care (waited over a hour and a half just to talk to a rep.) and had no success what so ever. Now I (and support) cannot even find my some of my "purchased music". The only thing that I have done differently the past few weeks was to download "Leopard". Could that have anything to do with this? This is very frustrating and now I cannot get any help from Apple ( I don't ) Care/Support.:mad::confused:
Click to expand...

You know it never occurred to me that this could be leopard related...
 
Mustard Chops...I am curious, were you able to find a solution to the problem with Itunes and the lost files....if so please share?
 
This is suddenly happening to me also and it's just infuriating! :mad:

I have my iTunes Library (~130GB) on an external USB 2.0 drive, and the only thing I have done differently since this started, is install Leopard... but I did a clean install though... :confused:
 
This too is driving me loopy :eek:

I've uploaded loads of stuff from CD's to my itunes library (which is housed on an external 1TB NAS Hard Drive (WD Worldbook 2nd Edition,) in the 'Shared Music' folder.)

When whenever I 'Update Library From Folder' there are a multitude of dreaded exclamation marks - Tracks just 'gone' from their folder location with absolutely no explanation :mad:

This is getting so infuriating that I am looking for an alternative to iTunes :mad: :mad: :mad:

HELP!
 
Mustard Chops said:
You know it never occurred to me that this could be leopard related...
Click to expand...

It isn't…
I had the same issue way back with Tiger.

The problem "went away" when I placed my iTunes library on my startup/system drive…
When I previously had it on another drive, internal (Mac Pro) or external (firewire), some tracks would go missing for no rhyme or reason. :eek:

Frustrating.
 
why don't you just reinstall itunes, select to create the itunes folder on the hard drive and, once installed, in the preferences select to keep a copy of your files in the itunes music folder. that should work...
and placing files on an external drive may cause problems...
so that could be the matter.
 
Brightneon said:
why don't you just reinstall itunes, select to create the itunes folder on the hard drive and, once installed, in the preferences select to keep a copy of your files in the itunes music folder. that should work...
and placing files on an external drive may cause problems...
so that could be the matter.
Click to expand...

Yes, but surely you should be able to store your iTunes folder wherever you like and point whichever computer you like at that source?

It is the iTunes software that is at fault here surely?
 
Of course you should be able to do that, but there's some sort of bug making it impossible, so you need to work around the bug until you fix it. Or you could use Songbird instead of iTunes, but the interface isn't as good and it's not very stable.
 
maxrobertson said:
Of course you should be able to do that, but there's some sort of bug making it impossible, so you need to work around the bug until you fix it. Or you could use Songbird instead of iTunes, but the interface isn't as good and it's not very stable.
Click to expand...

I've had a play with Songbird, but it doesn't rip tunes, also you can't import covers with it either...

You'd think with the popularity of iPods & iTunes that they'd sort it out...

Come on apple :rolleyes:
 
Its not OS related. I had this when using iTunes with Windows and I thought it was windows related because to my knowledge it hasn't happened on my mac (knock on wood).

It is very frustrating and a large part of my library that I paid for is gone and I dont know if its possible to get them back :(

iTunes REALLY needs a section to redownload all purchased music. I get mad when a song isn't in my iTunes and I click "Buy" again and it says "You already purchased this are you sure you want to buy again?"
 
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