OMFG!!! iTUNES deleted half my music!!!!!

[theman]

I went into itunes to play 1 song just now, and it wasn't there. then i notice that like 8/10 songs in most of my albums are missing. some albums are completely untouched though. yesterday i had 2700 songs, today i have 1500.

WHAT HAPPENED!!!! The original files are still there, it's just the library that's screwed up. But I just spend about 50 HOURS of work 2 weeks ago tagging and adding album art to all my music. NOW IT'S GONE!!!! WHY???? it was fine yesterday!!!

ohhh it feels like i just got hit by a train....

BTW, the most ravaged was Led Zeppelin, my FAVORITE band if you can't tell from my sig and avatar... why? why?

 

[theman]

HAHAHAHA I am so happy, I just remembered TIME MACHINE!!!! I just restored the WHOLE itunes folder, and YES!!!! it's all back!!!! hahahahaha


OK, now can somebody offer me some sort of explanation for this????

 

[killmoms]

As a point of interest, any re-tagging or adding of album artwork you do is stored in the files themselves, so re-adding them to the Library would've worked just fine. All you would've lost would be ratings/playcounts/skipcounts, etc.

As to why it happened, I've never heard of stuff randomly disappearing from iTunes libraries, so, I'm not sure what occurred. Maybe you accidentally hit "Delete" and didn't notice?

 

[ErikAndre]

It's because of 10.5.2... err.. wait... that's not out... can't blame it yet.

 

[theman]

As a point of interest, any re-tagging or adding of album artwork you do is stored in the files themselves, so re-adding them to the Library would've worked just fine. All you would've lost would be ratings/playcounts/skipcounts, etc.

As to why it happened, I've never heard of stuff randomly disappearing from iTunes libraries, so, I'm not sure what occurred. Maybe you accidentally hit "Delete" and didn't notice?

oh yeah, true, but the thing was, i did a lot of deleting of music i didn't want to listen to from my library. i basically went through song by song and deleted crap i had ripped from CD's way way back. i just don't want to listen to it. (yeah, it was a waste of money i know). if i lose my library, i would have add it all again and then remove things again.

also, i would lose album art right?

about accidentally deleting, that is possible, but there were just random songs missing, and those that were there were in the wrong order

e.g.

Album 1:

track 9
track 2

Album 2

track 5
track 1
track 8
track 4

it was like that.... weirdest thing ever. i hope doing the TM restore wont lead to some other strange probs in the future.

 

[BornAgainMac]

I rate my songs I want to delete with a single star. Then make sure my smart playlist never show songs with only 1 star. I can then delete them after a month or two in a controlled way. Same thing for photos with iPhoto.

 

[Antares]

Yeah, a couple of months ago, a bunch of my songs were suddenly missing from iTunes and I still don't know why... I didn't sync or do any deleting, either. I also don't know if I'm still missing anything. I have too many song to be able to tell.

 

[TEG]

All your tags and album artwork are stored in the audio file. Also, if you delete stuff from iTunes, you should make sure it is thrown in the trash, that way it never comes back if this should happen again.

TEG