iTunes is "loosing" my "original files". WTF?

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Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
I'm kind of a newbie to iTunes, and have come across a vexing problem. I've been loading in album after album onto a LaCie firewire drive (where my iTunes folder is) in preparation for loading most of it onto a new iPod. A bunch of the stuff that I loaded yesterday still shows up in the "Library" window, but there's a little exclamation mark to the left of the check box by the title. The error message reads, "The song, ______ could not be used because the original file could not be found" Would you like to find it?" When I click, "yes", it takes me to the music drive, and I navigate through all of the folders to find that the files are right there in the iTunes folder right where they're supposed to be. However, it only lets me "find" one at a time, and it seems to have "lost" over a hundred songs, even though they're right there.



What's going on, and what can I do to fix this?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 14
    I dont know but this problem just started to happen to me too. I thought it had something to do with me sharing my library over rendezvous but I dont really know. What I do know is that it is frustrating to have to find each individual track again. I mean wtf is up with that?
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  • Reply 2 of 14
    ah I know what your problem is, you probably pulled the songs onto your HD, into someplace you wanted, opened it with itunes without enabeling it (to organize files for you) then thinking it did, deleted the original. This is why you see the ! by the song, it means it cannot find your file again, because there is basically 2 ways for itunes to play your music from HD.

    1. It automatically saves a copy of the song in an itunes folder under Music and organizes it depending on name, genre, etc.

    2. It just remembers where your music is, so that if you had a music file on the desktop, and open it with itunes without having organization turned on it just remembers that the song is on the Desktop. Next time you click on the song from itunes it tries to go at the file on the desktop



    SO, this is how you enable automatic organization with itunes open, go to Preferences (click on the bold iTunes on the top left of the screen) under Advanced select both "keep itunes folder organized" and "copy files to itunes music folder when adding to library." that should solve all your problems. Just means you have to rip everything over again or pull it out of the trash
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  • Reply 3 of 14
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Chris Fitzgerald

    what can I do to fix this?



    straight to the point....

    In the Finder, highlight the songs that aren't showing up in iTunes.

    Double-click to open all highlighted files.



    This should make iTunes open all of them and you should now have TWO copies of each song in your iTunes library - one with an exclamation point and one without.



    Delete the library listing for each song that has the exclamation point and you're fine.



    The above is quicker, easier, and safer than any alternatives, including mucking around with your iTunes prefs at the risk of losing the link to all the other music on the LaCie drive.



    Been there, done that, trust me!
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  • Reply 4 of 14
    of course you have to have options enabled in itune's preferences for it to copy the music file...
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  • Reply 5 of 14
    Quote:

    Originally posted by FormerLurker

    straight to the point....

    In the Finder, highlight the songs that aren't showing up in iTunes.

    Double-click to open all highlighted files.



    This should make iTunes open all of them and you should now have TWO copies of each song in your iTunes library - one with an exclamation point and one without.



    Delete the library listing for each song that has the exclamation point and you're fine.



    The above is quicker, easier, and safer than any alternatives, including mucking around with your iTunes prefs at the risk of losing the link to all the other music on the LaCie drive.



    Been there, done that, trust me!




    or you could delete your whole music library in itunes and then just drag your music folder back onto itunes so it has the current location of them all.
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  • Reply 6 of 14
    sparhawksparhawk Posts: 134member
    it's called 'evolution of the language' tonton

    dictionaries don't dictate, they register hehe

    but we are getting totally of topic here and formerlurker gave a good solution, maybe a lock on this now
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  • Reply 7 of 14
    Quote:

    Originally posted by tonton

    Chris, your writing style is fine, but you along with too many other people in America should really learn how to spell the words "lose" and "losing" and "loser". I think that there must actually be a large number of teachers out there who don't know how to spell these words correctly. It's a sad statement on the current state of American education. Or maybe it's just that computers and television have further replaced books on our list of idle time activities.



    READ MORE, AMERICA!!!!






    It's called a typo. You can fix them in the body of vBulletin posts, but once there's one in the title of a thread, only a mod can fix it. Thanks for your concern, though...
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  • Reply 8 of 14
    Thanks for all of the replies everyone. I got the problem corrected by dragging folders into the playlist and then deleting the extra copies. It was annoying, but it worked. What I still don't understand is why this happened in the first place, or how I can keep it from happening in the first place.
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  • Reply 9 of 14
    tednditedndi Posts: 1,921member
    This happened to me as well.



    I have done the find workaround now several times and I am still losing files.



    WTF?



    iBug
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  • Reply 10 of 14
    satchmosatchmo Posts: 2,699member
    Damn, my most of my playlists suddenly disappeared! Did I trash something by accident?
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  • Reply 11 of 14
    Technically if you say you had an external HD you should have always used "time machine" witch is really helpful for that then u just have to go to time machine go to the time that you had all the song in a normal way and just restore ur itunes folder.
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  • Reply 12 of 14


    Media files collections, such as music, video, images and photos, often become the primary source of identical files for iTunes. If you have a music collection of several hundreds or even thousands mp3-files, you may want to sort them by deleting identical tracks. With Duplicate File Finder you can organize your media files and increase free disk space needed to enlarge your collection.

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