I ment :)

macster: I have tried to remove my entire library, and remake it by dropping the music map on it, adding every song in there at once. I have also tried to cconsolidate the library, but that only removed the songs completely. It's like iTunes just ignores the files like they weren't mp3 files at all, even though they obviously are.

I wanna know why the windows media playr for mac os x can't play mp3 and why isn't there a playlist like there is in the version for windows?

Does it really matter? WMP and all of the windows media formats truly suck anyway, so why use any of it? I would prefer not to touch it with a 50' pole.

same problem here!
 

And it is driving me slowly nuts!

Out of my library of 1150 songs itunes can't find 10-20 of them at any given time. I can manually "find" the songs through itunes but this is a pain for so many songs so frequently.

-I have never moved or touched my itunes library.
-This doesn't happen to songs that have end up in the "compilations" folder- I checked that.
-95% of my music isn't downloaded- it was ripped in to itunes 3 or 4 from the CDs. Thus, most of the "missing" songs are from CDs.
-I had this problem in itunes 3 and still have it in 4
-I have in prefs both 'keep itunes music organized" and "copy files to itunes music..." selected.
-I sync with my ipod and it neither seems to help the problem or make it worse.

Someone suggested "consolidating the library"- is that safe to do? The only music I have on my ibook is in itunes. Will it help?

Also, is there a way to "rebuild" the itunes library, like rebuilding the database in entourage?

my hunch is that this is a bug- i submitted feedback to apple about it and i think everyone else should do the same. I haven't tried calling apple care- since i paid for it that is what i'll do next.

Are there any resolutions for this? I have 115GB of music in almost 9000 tracks, and have them stored on a SMB-mounted share as I don't have room on my powerbook drive. Right now probably 30% of my tracks are showing up as "not there" with the exclamation mark, despite the fact that if I double click on one, it plays just fine and is not in fact missing.

I've tried consolidating my library, but can't consolidate it on my local drive due to a lack of space. Consolidating on another remote drive didn't solve the problem. If anything it's worse now. There's no way I'm going to reimport my whole library as I've rated EVERY SINGLE FILE and am not going to go through that again.

I've searched dougscripts.com and haven't found anything (yet) that will fix this problem.

Thanks,
- Andrew.

Hi aclarke- I hear you! I have the same problem. Except 97% of my songs wont play (I DON'T get the ! mark) I cant even figure out what is different between the songs that play and the ones that wont.

I have searched dougscripts too- and I thought AddLib might help but it didnt do anything that I can see- and I had it running all night!

I'm at my wits end. (and yes my files are stored externally as well)

I remember this happening before and found the fix. Now it is happening again and I can't remember the fix.

Why doesn't Apple make it as easy for iTunes as any other search for music
 

Various file searches will find songs that have the gray ! beside them, and then it's easy to drag them BACK into iTunes. Why can't it do that for you? Even limewire users find songs iTunes claims aren't on my computer. BTW, I use a Windows machine, too, and that's the one we're talking about, since this problem, based on posts, is a cross-platform one.

the answer is...
 

the easiest way i've found to recover all itunes tracks is simply to select all tracks, and delete, and move to the trash.
you probably want to be sure to empty the trash before doing so so as to make sure you aren't putting random stuff into your itunes.
once all your tracks are safely deleted from itunes, open your trash. simply select all tracks, drag and drop back to itunes.
i had this happen just today after a dejavu back-up that occured last night. i have roughly 40gbs of music and nearly half of the tracks "could not be located".
i knew i wasn't going to spend the rest of my life relocating each track by hand!
also... i tried the "bring out yer dead" script which is useful if you're only missing a couple of tracks, but then... if you're only missing a couple of tracks, you don't need a script.
which is my complaint about "boyd". useful in the most retarded way.
anywho... hope this helps anyone that runs into this issue again.

peas.

I have the same problem. saturnine, I like your tip except I lose my Play Counts which are quite valuable to me. Reinstating them is as much work as manually locating each track.

I've never had to post to the forums here because I have always found a solution to my problems! I'm having the same probems everyone on this thread is having. The only difference is that I'm finding the missing songs in my compilations folder when the songs aren't in any compilations on my itunes!....Say i have a U2 album in my itunes folder....track 3 & 7 are missing from the "joshua tree" but ARE in the compilations folder in another folder titled "joshua tree"....really confusing. I have to grab those 2 songs, and put them into the U2 "joshua tree" folder....like they were relocated when I imported the CD....just using U2 to make a point here...

iTunes is randomly putting some songs from some albums and sometimes ENTIRE albums into my compilations folder!...at this point, I assume I have to manually put everything back into it's respective folder....which is a pain when you have 90 gigs of music!

any suggestions?

if you are using windows, find this file:

iTunes Music Library.xml, I found mine in: C:\Documents and Settings\***\My Documents\My Music\iTunes

it could be named something else I guess ... so if you can't find this file, search for any XML and look through the ones belonging to iTunes.

if it's huge you'll need a unix program like less to go through it or some other editor that doesn't try to load it all into memory to view it ...

search through this file and you'll eventually come across the path after a tag like this: <key>Location</key>

in my case, I had re-mapped a drive using a different letter than the one contained in this file. I switched the drive back to the old letter and things were fine.

cheers,

-geoff.

Sorry. Should have stated...G4 tower, dual 500, OSX10.4.11, whatever the newest version of itunes is today.

Gyaworski (geoff),

I had to register on this message board just to give you props. You are the man!

I read this whole message string and was just about to give up when right at the end you had posted the perfect fix to my problem. That's probably why there aren't many posts after yours. You solved the riddle.

I guess by plugging in various external data storage devices, the external hard drive that I keep all my music in got assigned a different letter than when I originall set up iTunes.

Anyhow, for those of you using Windows, check out this link if you need to figure out how to change a drive letter: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844

Thanks again Geoff. You just save me hours and hours of dreadful reconfiguring.

- Aaron

ok. so i followed a variation of one of the suggestions (saturnine). i selected everything in my itunes library and deleted them. when prompted whether to delete or keep the actual files , i KEPT the actual files. when the library was empty, i went to file->add to library and selected my iTunes music folder. the whole process took about 15 minutes - i have about 20gb of songs - and iTunes also went ahead and retrieved all the album artwork. seems to be working fine now.

i dont know how this will affect my "purchased music" stuff and whether iTunes will remember that I actually bought songs that might still have the path missing in that particular folder. But my main library is now all synced up with none of the annoying grey ! marks.

Potential Solution !!
 

I was having the same problem as a lot of the people here and i found the cause of the problem!
(or at least this was the cause for me)

The problem began when I moved my whole itunes library from a PC to a new MacBook. I was very careful about moving all the library files etc and was pleased to find that everything worked well, that was until random songs were unlinked. After getting bored of relinking seemingly random songs every now and then, i decided that there must be a cause, and here it is:

Macs have restricted file name lengths!!

Windows file names can be basically as long as you want, so when the music was imported originally it had full filename lengths. After moving the files to my MacBook, the filenames were chopped in length.
It was only songs that had long names that needed relinking.

Can anyone think of a possible solution to this?
I'd imagine that it would involve editing the XML file and/or Library file(s) (in which case we're all stuffed)

Does this 'cause' apply to anyone else? It's definitely my problem.

___

Mike

Mike,

I have been having this same problem very recently. And it does seem to occur to tracks with long path/filenames. In my case over 100 tracks are affected.

This happened to me overnight. I'm not sure what triggered it. My iTunes library and media tracks are stored on a USB hard drive connected to an XP server. I have iTunes 9.1 on OSX.4.11 and iTunes 9.? on XPSP3 accessing the same library.

I can individually locate the files affected, however it is very time consuming for the number of tracks affected, and I have no idea whether the same problem will occur again sooner or later.

Cheers
Crabbey

mcharvey10. I am having the same problem, except my problem is that my XP PC died and I bought a new windows laptop. But when I downloaded the itunes data from my external HD to my new itunes file, the itunes library appeared, but no sound. I think I may have solved the problem after reading all of the above. I deleted all the library contents in itunes and then copied the itunes music file back into itunes and it seems to be working.
it.iliterate

After reload of Mac OS - itunes is broken
 

In 3 months with the wonderful world of Apple (many years a windows user) - I seem to have problem after problem.

Certainly a very poor experience so far.

I have a brand spanking new iMac. Due to numerous difficulties I decided to reinstall the OS. Mac OS X 10.6. this was reinstalled to a 'clean drive'.

I have a Synology server setup with all my music files on it. Before the reinstall - itunes worked fine.

Now - having pointed the library to the Synology - iTunes refuses to display any tracks in the music library at all.

It does, however, show the diskstation in the shared folder.

At a loss - again.

No doubt - more 'fiddling' required.

Apologies for sounding irritated.

Just very, very disappointed with the much vaunted 'World of Apple'