iTunes Headache
Having a weakness for gadgets, I ran out and purchased a 4 GB iPod mini when they first came out a while ago ($250). The iPod itself I love. It is durable, easy to operate and contains enough space to carry a ton of my favorite songs (about 1000 or so) at one time. It was a good investment especially since three mp3 players I had before – 2 nuvo brand players and 1 RCA – broke after a few months of use.
However, I can’t say my luck with iTunes has been the same. Over the past year, a number of my songs have simply disappeared, as if I had moved them out of my iTunes library. The strange thing is, iTunes recognizes the song titles, but when selected an exclamation point appears next to the song title along with the phrase “The song ‘(name of song)’ could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?” When clicking on “yes” it simply takes me to the My Music folder and the song is no longer there.
This has happened periodically over the past year to a few handfuls of songs, but last night, I checked my iTunes to find that literally 95% or so of my songs in iTunes had disappeared in such a fashion. This was close to 600 or so tracks I had burned off my CDs and an equal number of songs I had downloaded from music services. I know this sounds ridiculous, but apparently I am not the only one this has happened to.
Does anyone know how this could have happened? More importantly, is there a fix to this so I can retrieve my songs? Needless to say, this is unbelievably annoying, and although I still have my CDs (but not the songs I downloaded from the internets) I worry about spending the time to import them again only to have them vanish into some blackhole. This really sucks.
The Comments
D.M.B. October 30, 2005 at 11:40pm
Does it take the songs off your ipod? When you import a song from a CD to your ipod, iTunes should make a copy of the song SOMEWHERE on your computer. Now of course these take up space. What I do is I just erase them. The fallback to that is that you can’t use them in iTunes because the song is no longer on your computer. It’s just like any music player (WinAmp, Real player, etc.) on your computer, you have to have the actual song on there to listen to it on the comp.
D.M.B. October 30, 2005 at 11:45pm
the best website I’ve found is ipodlounge.com There you can find about anything and everything iPod. Message Boards, FAQ’s, reviews on the iPods and it’s many accessories.
Mr. T October 31, 2005 at 12:27pm
Thanks for the link. I checked it out a bit and will return later tonight. No, it didn’t take things off my iPod itself. I imagine if I had it set on auto-synchronize (I have it set on manual) and plugged it in, I might have synched into the dead songs and truly lost everything on my iPod, although I have no idea and am not going to try it out as an experiment for obvious reasons. Thus, luckily, I did have about 700 songs on my iPod, and was able to transfer them all successfully back to my HD after viewing them as hidden files and moving them back into the iTunes library as per some instructions I found on the apple boards. Still, I lost a few hundred songs that I didn’t have on my iPod and couldn’t relocate any of them after searching my HD.
I should also mention that I use iTunes for windows. Looking at the apple boards, it appears that almost one out of every 20 or so complaints has to do with windows users missing songs. I wonder if this is something specific to the windows platform. Although plenty of people seem to have experienced the same problem, I have yet to find documentation anywhere which identifies exactly what the problem is so it can be avoided. In the meantime, I upgraded to 6.01 or whatever the latest iTunes is, as well 1.4 for my iPod mini, and everything seems fine so far, so I went ahead and imported a handful of my CDs back to iTunes yesterday.
Ultimately, I think what I am going to have to do is shell out more $$$ and buy an external HD to save my music in just in case my songs vanish into thin air again. I will probably buy another, larger iPod as well since my mini is already nearing capacity with songs and I intend to put a lot of podcasts on it too since that feature is now available (which is a really nice feature).
At the same time, this experience is enough to make part of me want to chuck iTunes/iPod, but the other part of me knows that every other player I have had has busted in a matter of weeks (not one but two Creative NUVO players), and in one case I had a player that busted within one week (an RCA Lyra).
Mr. Wilson October 31, 2005 at 12:48pm
Boy am I glad I don’t own an MP3 player! Even several generations in, the things still suck. That’s not a universal truth, but based on all the scuttlebutt I hear, generally speaking it’s accurate enough.
If you’re really ticked at your iPod, you can always vent vicariously.
D.M.B. October 31, 2005 at 4:09pm
Don’t be down on the mp3 players Mr. Wilson. They’re very convenient and easy to use. What Mr. T went through is pretty common problem. If you can really call it a problem. I don’t find it necessary to listen to iTunes cause I’ve got the player and I know I can’t keep all the songs that I have on my hard drive. So basically you are sacrificing iTunes for hard drive space. I really don’t understand what’s so difficult about knowing that you actually need the song on your computer to listen to it on your computer.