Automatically find missing songs marked with !

Have two user profiles on our iMac (my wife can't use left/right-clicks, I can't live without them). The iTunes libray on both is mapped to the same shared external drive.
While the iTunes in my user profile can find all songs, the iTunes in my wife's user profile has nearly 2,000 songs it can't find. I am able to fix the link.. ..one.. ..at.. ..a.. ..time.. ..by locating the song in the Music folder on the shared drive. The problem seems to be that the song name has a prefix double-digit number corresponding to the order that it is played on the associated album - so the.. ..one.. ..at.. ..a.. ..time.. ..fix is very systematic. I've wittled it down to 1,700.
I'm looking for an automatic process. Can you help?
larry :-)
============

Sorry, that link used to take you to the free Applescript but it looks like the author is now "encouraging" people in the direction of the commercial app versions.
Super Remove Dead Tracks - http://dougscripts.com/212 then type "super remove dead" into the search line to get to the Applescript rather than the app.
I am totally lost without having you provide a detailed description of exactly how you moved your files to produce all this. To start with, I have no idea how many real library entries you have and how many of this 45,000 are dead.
Tracks marked with a ! are dead. iTunes does not look directly at your files. It keeps a separate library listing of what tracks you have and what they are called, then a reference pointer to a file on your computer. A dead link is a track entry that has an invalid file entry. This is common when libraries are not moved correctly, especially between drives. You can, for example, have a library carry over, a link gets broken, you add the file again and it gets entered a second time. The first entry with the ! is broken and doing nothing, the second is real.
How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2905
Posts by turingtest2 about different types of duplicates and techniques - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3555601 and https://discussions.apple.com/message/16042406 (Note: The DeDuper script is for Windows)
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php (commercial)
http://www.hardcoded.net/dupeguru_me/
http://www.wideanglesoftware.com/tunesweeper/index.php

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don't you just love the way Apple answers your questions in this forum?

I-tunes wont automatically find any Song titles, or art work.

Not sure if anyone can help, but we have 2 i-tunes libary's on our computer. Mine works fine, the itunes libary, will import the CD, and find the song names and the art work all automatically on my libary, but when my husband then switches to his libary, the libary will not automatically find art work or song names. If he presses get song names it does then find them, but it still wont find artwork at all, we have checked the settings on both systems and it seems to be exactly the same? any ideas???
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Is his library connected to the internet or the itunes store? And are you working on the same computer?

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How can I get iTunes to automatically find the file for songs marked with ! without manually doing each one?

Ok, we've had a problem with our external hard drive which holds all of our music files (our H drive). It's the 2nd time going down and we're just chalking it up as a failure. Fortunately, we had it all backed up onto another external hard drive (our G drive). We re-did iTunes back in February (bringing all the files in, sorting, playlists, etc) after fixing it the first time. So I have that exact files from then (on the G drive) minus a new CD or two, nothing major. But when I open that iTunes library, it doesn't find the music that is connected to it - even though all the music is in the folder connected to the library (all in G drive). I'm not sure if this file is still trying to look for my H drive folder.
I found a previous question asked on here about the ! songs. I brought in all the music from the iTunes/Music folder. So of course, I have double now. I would just go delete all the rest - except for this. What about my playlists?? I don't really want to recreate each one manually. I have also adjusted a ton of info in iTunes over the years to make things easier (fixed spelling when it brings it from a CD wrong, etc). That brings me back to wondering if I could have iTunes automatically search for its own file instead of me doing it for 7,500+ songs.
Any ideas?? Or am I just stuck doing a lot of work?
Thanks!

If what is on the G: drive is a mirror of what was on the H: drive, then get Windows to change the drive letter of G: to H:
If a simple fix isn't forthcoming then my FindTracks script should be able to reconnect the missing tracks to iTunes. FindTracks uses some fuzzy matching routines and searches for multiple potential locations. For more details see this thread.
tt2

Finding Missing Songs

Hi,
I recently encoutered a problem with my iPod and had to reformat it. Before I did this, I copied all of the iPod files to a hard drive so I could transfer them back and keep all my songs, playlists, etc. When I did this I went through all the song folders I had copied and noticed 2 weren't the same file size they were on the iPod. So when I transfered everything back, everything shows up, but some of the songs from the 2 corrupted folders are missing. Is there a way to search my iPod for these "dead" songs, so I can update them with the songs saved on my computers hard drive?
Right now all I can do is play through each song and see if a "!" icon appears by it and it skips the song. I have about 4000 songs and don't really want to do that. Thanks for the help.

Hi
I had this problem recently. I have a massive library and after moving and consolidating my iTunes folder onto a new hard drive, some 700 songs came up as 'missing'.
My tried opening up iTunes Music Libary.xml in BBEdit (it was over 100mb in size) and scrolling through the entries until i found a bunch of files with the wrong path. Its a good idea to make a copy of the .xml file before doing this, just in case.
Anyway, in BBEdit I could see they were referencing:
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Volumes/Windows/MP3s/artist/songname.mp3</string>
and they should have been referencing:
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Volumes/Music/MP3s/artist/songname.mp3</string>
God knows how this happened - somehow iTunes got confused and the library got partly corrupted suppose.
Anyway, I simply did a find and replace of the paths
ie
find: file://localhost/Volumes/Windows/
replace with: file://localhost/Volumes/Music/
It took a few go's to change them all for some reason, but finally it found no more entries. I then saved the .xml file and launched iTunes, hoping it would have fixed all the missing tracks...
Alas, it didnt fix it - I suppose they are also referenced in the iTunes LIbrary file which I have no idea how to edit.
Can anyone else give any pointers on how to edit this file?
Cheers

How to get iTunes to find all missing songs which are in the library

iTunes keeps telling me it can't find around 150 songs and I have to manually point it to each folder - it offers to use location to find other missing tracks but that only works for songs in the same album folder, not other artists/albums. Is there something I can do to find all songs at once?

Hi,
Try Doug's Applescripts for iTunes, he has one for finding missing songs.
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=listmias
You can browse his site to find where to put the downloaded script.
Good luck.

(!) How to locate the original file for missing songs?

song could not be used because original file could not be found. Would you like to locate?
I got this message when I last tried to synch my ipod. The message said there were 100 files which could not be found.   Actually more than 100 songs show the exclamation mark that says the file can not be found.
Previous posts on this issue suggest the underlying file has been changed or moved out from the ITunes organisation. Well the last time I synched my ipod on Lion a few days ago it was fine. On Sunday I wiped my hard drive, carried out the upgrade to Mountain Lion as a clean install, and used Migration Assistant to bring my user data over. After that I ran cclean and disk utility permissions and disk verification. Then this happened.
I migrated my iTunes Library to an external hard drive six months ago. That was disconnected during the upgrade so I am not sure why the files can’t be found now.    Anyway, I want to recover the missing files . I could not find them by name, album or artist on the external drive. So I thought I would find them in Time Machine backup #1. I couldn’t!. Nor could I find missing songs on my alternate Time Machine backup #2. Both Time Machine backups are set to include the external drive. Songs recognised in iTunes are visible in the backups, but not the ones that are missing.
I have a third backup volume which was a clone of the Lion setup before I did the upgrade, but I can’t access this or Mac for a few days.
I did have some permissions failures after the 10.7.4 upgrade which resulted in creating 2 new standard user accounts. Maybe I’v e got some files across these users? But in that case I’d have seen problems before the upgrade?   I notice a fair number of these are compilations imported from CD about 4 years ago. Bu tnot all.
(1). Is there a smart way to list all the files that are missing?
I can scroll through all of ITunes Music to see where there are exclamation marks. I’d like to only list these missing songs.
(2). How can I locate the missing media files?
- a search on Name / Album / Artist hasn’t found them in live drives or on TM backups. I’ve still got the missing songs on my iPod, however.
Once I can answer these questions with your help I’ll know what would be the best way to try to recover, and to work out what went wrong. I’m shocked that I can’t find them in backup.   Eventually I can restore audio from original source. If they were photos that went missing from library and backups then I would have no way to get back!
(3) could this happen in iPhoto? (shiver)

Thanks for taking the time to look at my problem. Shared is empty and I didn't back it up - I only transferred the standard and Admin users to the clean install of Mountain Lion.
But I got some valuable insight into how the iTunes library is set up from your article on split Libraries. I'd like to see it in the Tips for iTunes for Mac.   My Itunes library was set up in pre-Itunes 8 structure, and as I'd moved it to an external drive it didn't get migrated to the new structure in recent upgrades, perhaps?
I found your article extremely useful : https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3991. That gave me the means to restore the missing files more quickly than getting the original CDs out and re-importing them to iTunes.
So I've now restored the missing files and started the backups rolling ....
I still don't understand how they went missing. However the best backup was the Ipod itself.

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Maybe you rename it. Somehow the path to the songs have changed if not deleted.
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The exclamation mark next to a song means it is no longer where iTunes is looking for it. iTunes won't let you add such "missing" songs to a playlist. Possible reasons for a song going missing are that you or some third party software has moved or deleted it, or a folder that contained it, or that the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter, or a configuration file has changed making iTunes look in a slightly different place from before.
Select one of the songs with an exclamation mark, press CTRL+I to Get Info, say no when prompted to locate it, then note down the location from the Summary tab that begins file://localhost/ - please post back this path as given. Hopefully you can find the file this entry in your library is supposed to be connected to. Assuming you can please post back this path as well. These two items of information may suggest a fix through folder manipulation or a configuration change.
If things have got a little more disorganized then, as long as the tracks still exist to be found, my FindTracks script should be able to reconnect them to iTunes. FindTracks uses some fuzzy matching routines and searches for multiple potential locations. For more details see this thread. Start by selecting the tracks of a single album and then run the script. Your media folder should normally be detected automatically, e.g. as C:\Users\<User>\iTunes\iTunes Media, but you can edit the path if it is wrong or a particular batch of lost files are stored at another path. If it works as expected you can then move on to fixing the rest of the library in bigger batches.
tt2

TS2972 used to be able to pick out which songs in iTunes in my computer were not on a 2nd computer on homeshare in iTunes 10. Now with V11, cant find the button that compares two libraries and finds the songs that are different. Anyone know how to do th

Used to be able to pick out which songs in iTunes in my computer were not on a 2nd computer on homeshare in iTunes 10. Now with V11, cant find the button that compares two libraries and finds the songs that are different. Anyone know how to do this now?

Jneklason wrote:
~snip~
I know this email is confusing and really hard to understand...perhaps now you will know how i've been feeling--lost and confused with all the mis-information, with a hit and miss phone, and out of time with all the 1 1/2 hr to 2 hrs EACH wasted on this issue.
On top of all this, I can't even find out how to file a complaint with anyone higher up than Customer Service.
I hate to tell you this, but you didn't write an email. You wrote a discussion post on the Verizon Wireless Community forum which is a public peer to peer forum. Unfortunately since you didn't mark your post as a question, the VZW reps that roam this community won't ever see your post. Before you re-post it, don't. Duplicate posts get removed from the community.
I see there were several missteps both by the reps and yourself in your post. First you should have insisted on returning the phone within the 14 day return policy period. Second which Samsung Galaxy mini model did you purchase? The S3 mini or the S4 mini? Did you do any research prior to deciding on this device. The reps at that time deflected the easiest course of action, by trying to get you to replace the phone under insurance instead of returning the phone. The Early Edge payment option requires the current phone on the line using the early Edge must be returned to Verizon Wireless. Did you once considered going to a third party site like Swappa to purchase a gently used device for your daughter?

Find Missing Files Automatically

Is there a way to make itunes find missing files automatically?

The "missing file" thing happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, or that the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place.
Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to get info, then say no when asked to locate the track. Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. I can provide a step by step guide if you give me the two paths.
In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps and locate the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. This feature should work if the files are in the standard iTunes layout but on a different path from that expected by the library. Alternatively, as long as you can find a location holding the missing files, then you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes.
tt2

How can I find all exclamation marks in my iTunes without clicking on each song? Is there a way to delete all instead of one at a time?

How can I find all exclamation marks in my iTunes without clicking on each song? Can they be deleted all at once instead of one song at a time?

Lost & Found
Create a playlist called Found, select everything in Music and drag it into the Found playlist (it may take some time to count the tracks that are to be dropped). Create a smart playlist called Lost matching All the rules Playlist is Music and Playlist is not Found. Your lost tracks will be in this playlist.
Optional: It depends a bit on why things aren't where iTunes expects to find them but if they are in sensible Artist & Album folders in some common location then my FindTracks script should be able to reconnect them to iTunes. FindTracks uses some fuzzy matching routines and searches for multiple potential locations. For more details see this thread. Once you have repaired the tracks that can be found you can drag the contents of the Lost playlist into Found which will update things.
Or, you can simply delete all the tracks in the Lost playlist with Ctrl-A to select them and then Shift-Delete to delete.
tt2

HT1386 Switched from ipod to ipod touch. When trying to sync songs get lost. Show in the library and playlist but a message says cannot be found. An exclamation symbol with a circle aroung it shows on the missing songs. How can I sync the new ipod touch?

Switched from ipod to ipod touch. When trying to sync, songs get lost. Songs show in the library and playlist but get a message that says songs cannot be found. An exclamation symbol with a circle aroung it shows on the missing songs. How can I sync the new ipod touch?

The ! Next to a song:
The song can’t be located; it may have been moved or deleted
To find them try:
iTunes: Finding lost media and downloads
You can redownload iTunes purchases by:
Downloading past purchases from the App Store, iBookstore, and iTunes Store

IOS 7 problems finding songs, playlist missing songs

I had a playlist that included several songs from a particular artist but since upgrading from iOS 6.1.3 I can only see one of the tracks remaining. The other songs appear to be removed and searching for missing songs/parent album/artist does not produce any results at all.
The songs are still on the iPhone and I can navigate to them, but only as follows:
Play the one surviving track from this artist/album still in my playlist.
Switch to 'now playing' to select other tracks on the album, including the missing playlist items that Music Search can't find.
It seems like an indexing problem. I'll try removing all the music and resyncing from iTunes and reply with the results. Maybe this will help someone else...
Running iOS 7.0.2 on iPhone 5 64GB. Problem has been present since iOS 7.0.0
Music ~= 20-30GB on iPhone.

Third update (sync takes hours so I can only do this once a day...)
iTunes 11.1.1 did not help.
I deleted all music on the device from Settings > Usage > Music > Edit > Delete (which, incidentally, took two attempts before it actually deleted it).
Then I performed a clean sync of my selected playlists again (about 5800 songs)
The sync completed but the iphone was still missing over 1500 songs.
I tried another sync immediately. The process stayed on 'waiting to apply changes' for about 15 minutes, then completed. A few more songs were sync'd but it was still missing 1400+ songs.
The playlist with missing songs was still missing some tracks, but different ones this time. To test if the playlist was the problem I deleted all music from the iPhone again and sync'd just two playlists, including the problematic one. It sync'd all tracks on both playlists, so it doens't appear to be the playlist that is breaking the sync.
I will try one last attempt by restoring the phone as a new device then syncing all my playlists before reapplying the backup data. If that still doesn't work then there is clearly a problem with the sync process that previously worked fine on earlier versions of iOS / iTunes.

Automatically find missing songs marked with !

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