Finding missing music....

Hi all, My 5G 30Gb iPod Video has tranferred all my music and videos to the iPod except 3 songs. I believe these songs are incorrectly formated as mp3 and therefore not playable on the iPod and I need to find them in order to format them correctly. Is there an easy way to find them without having to compare my iPods contents with all the files on my computer? We are talking about 2365 songs all in individual folders and comparing the two would be very time-consuming!

Hello Canadiandude and welcome to the Apple Discussions.
There are a couple of ways to do this.
I will assume that the rest of your tracks are in the AAC format. The first method is the simplest:
Go to View Options (Command-J or Edit->View Options)
Turn on KIND.
You will now have a column for the KIND of file it is. Click on the column header to sort by it, you should now clearly see the 3 files.
Another method is to create a Smart Playlist to look for the type of file for which you seek. "MPEG audio file" is the KIND that an MP3 is identified as. Setup the Smart Playlist to only contain tracks with KIND that IS "MPEG audio file".
Now what gets me here is you state that they are MP3 files, yet they will not transfer to the iPod. Weird. I have no problem using WAV, MP3 or AAC files on my iPod. Perhaps the files in question are formatted in a strange way that just wont work on an iPod. idk.
In any case, the methods above will allow you to find your unique files.
Beavis2084

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How to find missing music

I backed-up my iTunes on an external drive and then did a system restore on my computer. The 'restore' didn't take iTunes out but left it empty. Transfered everything from the external back to the computer and plugged in the iPod ...... AAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH
It updated and gave me ~1200 of the 5939 songs I had. Tried a couple things but didn't change anything, plugged it in again and it gave me another 4000. A physical search (ie looking through everything) revealed that it didn't transfer everything from the external.
I have 5763 songs out of the 5939 that I had. Is there an easy way to find the missing 176? I have the entire list on the external drive but I can't open 2 iTunes at once.

One way would be to open iTunes to see what the library has then open Windows Explorer and use that to look through contents of external drive comparing the two lists.

How do I find missing music from my i-tunes library?

My iPod classic 30 GB will not sync and now my entire library of songs is gone. How can I get them back?

Not really. When I went through Apple's troubleshooting steps, it would ultimately say that there was no device detected, yet my computer can detect the i-pod as it automatically loads i-tunes when I plug in my device. After it is connected, my device continues to display the "do not disconnect" message no matter the length of time it remains connected. It was after I completed the troubleshooting steps that my library disappeared, other than the few songs I had just purchased that day.

Itunes: i want to find a single fix for missing music on itunes rather than using "iTunes: Finding lost media and downloads" on a case by case basis.

recently when i was creating a playlist, i realized that i was missing music from my extensive itunes (12.0.1.26) library. i found the solution "itunes: finding lost media and downloads" and used the general approach to find the music in finder and copy it to itunes. i don't want to do this every time i find i am missing music. is there an automated fix? i want apple to develop a way to automate the fix. can it be that this isn't a problem for many people?
i ask this now because i just looked for music i thought i had but can't find. maybe i am wrong about having the artist, but it has happened on another artist too. i can't trust itunes to tell me whether i have a song or not. i don't want to keep going back to finder, especially when the instructions in "itunes: finding lost media and downloads" doesn't actually reflect my system (os x 10.7.5).
i don't want to try to do a restore. i have never done a restore on my mac (previously a pc user). and, i don't know how far back to take the restore to find the old music. and then music i have added since i lost the old music wouldn't be there.
i understand that there are so many system variables that apple would need to take into consideration with a general fix. but: i am assuming that apple's changes have caused my problem and feel that apple should do something to fix it. perhaps my assumption is incorrect.
thank you for your help.

limnos, i always have backups. the problem is that i don't know how far back in time to take a restore because i don't know how long this has been going on. and, if i take the restore back very far, i will lose what has been added since the music started to disappear.
i don't even know what you mean when you say "you will check there aren't any broken links (use a script from the Dougscripts web site) before you do a backup."
i agree with you to some extent about not automatically installing upgrades. i'm still running lion and was pushed to it from snow leopard. the problem is that i have a hard time envisioning the changes described in an update to judge whether something is valuable or not.
i have questions about your last paragraph. i'm going to repeat it here and then insert my questions as i go. please forgive my all caps for the moment:
"Now for your missing music, is it that there are broken links, or are things missing completely from the library?" I DON'T KNOW ENOUGH TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION. I BELIEVE THAT THE PROBLEM HAS TO DO WITH BROKEN LINKS. WHEN I COULDN'T FIND THE MUSIC THAT I THOUGHT I HAD LOADED INTO ITUNES YEARS AGO, I FOUND THE CD'S AND IMPORTED THEM TO ITUNES. I GOT A MESSAGE ABOUT SOME OF THE TRACKS BEING DUPLICATES THAT ASKED WHETHER I WANTED TO IGNORE OR IMPORT. I CHOSE IMPORT BECAUSE ITUNES DIDN'T TELL ME WHAT WAS DUPLICATED. IT WAS ONLY AFTER RE-IMPORTING SEVERAL CD'S THAT I REALIZED THAT THERE WERE NOW DUPLICATES OF THE CD'S: THE FILES I HAD JUST LOADED AND THOSE THAT I HAD LOADED SOME TIME AGO. THE ORIGINALS MAGICALLY APPEARED AFTER I RE-IMPORTED THE CD'S. I'M GUESSING THAT THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A BROKEN LINK I DON'T KNOW HOW TO RECOGNIZE A BROKEN LINK OR HOW TO PREVENT ONE. AFTER I REALIZED THE PROBLEM, I FOUND THE "FINDING LOST MEDIA AND DOWNLOADS" QUIDE. I LOCATED THE MISSING MUSIC IN FINDER AND DRAGGED IT TO ITUNES. DOES THIS COUNT AS A BROKEN LINK?
"If the latter and you use iTunes default settings for managing media, you can drag your media folder to Automatically Add To iTunes. It should add anything in the folder but not in the library list but ignore things that are." CAN YOU REPHRASE THIS LAST PARAGRAPH? I DON'T KNOW WHAT "DEFAULT SETTINGS FOR MANAGING MEDIA" MEANS.
FOR "DRAG MEDIA FOLDER TO AUTOMATICALLY ADD TO ITUNES," I THINK YOU MEAN I CAN DRAG /MUSIC/ITUNES/ITUNES MEDIA/MUSIC IN FINDER TO THE ITUNES ICON IN THE DOCK. AND, THAT THAT ACTION WILL REPLACE ANYTHING MISSING IN ITUNES BUT NOT DUPLICATE THE FILES THAT ARE IN ITUNES. IS THAT RIGHT?
thank you for your time and help, limnos.

I bought an album on my iPhone and it never transferred to my iTunes account. It has disappeared now and I'm not allowed to buy it again. How can I find my missing music album or have the option to purchase it again?

I bought an album on my iPhone and it never transferred to my iTunes account. It has disappeared now and I'm not allowed to buy it again. How can I find my missing music album or have the option to purchase it again?

Hello bubblegirl2,
Thank you for the details of the issue you are experiencing with your purchased album.
First, I recommend trying to download the album from you list of past purchases. Use the steps in the section titled "Download previous purchases on Mac or PC > iTunes Store" in the following article:
Download past purchases
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2519
If you have tried those steps and still do not see the album, it may be that the album is hidden. Follow the steps below in iTunes on your computer to check if it is hidden and unhide it:
To unhide your purchases
Open iTunes on your Mac or PC.
If you're not already signed in, choose Store > Sign in.
Choose Store > View My Account. (You may be asked to enter your password again).
On your Account Information summary, scroll down to the "iTunes in the Cloud" section and click Manage.
Choose a content type by clicking Music, TV shows, Apps, or Books from the top.
Click the Unhide button next to the item you would like to restore.
Note: If the item you are unhiding is not already downloaded on your computer locally, it will begin downloading automatically.
iTunes Store: Hiding and unhiding purchases
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4919
If you are still not able to download the album, you can report the issue with this purchases using the steps in this article:
How to report an issue with your iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store, or iBookstore purchase
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1933
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Sheila M.

HT201272 i can't find the option to re download my missing music

aI have missing music from my library since updating itunes. How cn I download it?

Downloading past purchases from the App Store, iBookstore, and iTunes Store

Why can't iTunes find the music from an external hard drive?

I moved my music to an external hard drive to free up space on my old laptop. Since I moved to a new laptop, iTunes never seems to find the music. I have to go through and manually select a song for it to find it one and then it says should it use this to find the rest of the songs. Then it crashes. I have reinstalled iTunes tonight with no real improvement. I want to be able to create a playlist to upload to my new iPad as well as updating music on my iPod but I can't do any of it. Please, any advice!

angelafromlanchester wrote:
I moved my music to an external hard drive to free up space on my old laptop. Since I moved to a new laptop, iTunes never seems to find the music.
Has the new laptop given the external drive a different drive letter?
The "missing file" error 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, one of its parent folders, or 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 click No when asked to try to locate the track. (Due to a bug in iTunes 12 you currently have to say No twice!) 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, a folder renamed, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. If the difference between the two paths is an additional Music folder in one path then this is a layout issue. I can explain further if that is the case.
In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links.
If another application like Windows Media Player has moved/renamed the files then the chances are that subtle differences in naming strategies will make it hard to restore the media to the precise path that iTunes is expecting. In such cases, as long as the missing files can be found somewhere, you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes. See this post for an explanation of how it works.
tt2

ITunes can not find my music on external hard drive

Had to redo my hard drive; had all music on external hard drive; copied iTunes folder onto external hard drive. Now that my desktop hard drive is clean, and new iTunes downloaded, it can not find my music on the external drive which I have always used. Is there some setting I am missing, do I have to copy music onto CPU?

Hold the SHIFT key while launching iTunes. You will get the option to navigate to the iTunes folder on your external drive. In the iTunes folder point it to the iTunes Library.itl file.

My iTunes can't find my music?

Recently I had moved all my music files to one location so I can always find where my music is instead of having to scrounge through all my files to find it. Now doing that made all my music files in iTunes have a "!" next to them. I double-click on the music with the "!" (which happens to be EVERY music file on there) and it tells me I have to find the music. So I go to the location where I moved ALL my music and it asks me if I would like to use the location on a certain song and find other music in that same location. keep in mind again that ALL my music in in that one location and when I let it search the location it only finds like 6 files out of the 600 missing. If anyone can please help me I would really appreciate it. I don't know if this is important, but I use iTunes for Windows XP.

See Here for Moving your iTunes Media Folder:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364
And Here for Finding Lost Media:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1408

TS1717 I cannot get iTunes to automatically launch at startup in Windows 7. I need it to do this so my Apple TV 'finds' my Music Library, which is stored on an external hard-drive, connected to my Windows 7 PC.

I cannot get iTunes to automatically launch at startup in Windows 7. I need it to do this so my Apple TV 'finds' my Music Library, which is stored on an external hard-drive, connected to my Windows 7 PC. Anyone know how I do this? I cannot seem to find anything on Google, which is surprising.
iTunes helper launches OK, but not iTunes itself. Am I being dim?
Thanks

The iTunes application should be installed on the system drive. You may need to repair iTunes to fix that error regarding a missing .exe.
To organize your library properly see Make a split library portable.
If you don't have a working version of the library that can be transformed into a portable shape I have tools and techniques that can repair the broken links.
tt2

HT201272 i seem to be missing music from my itunes account - it was there earlier this week and when i plugged in my phone to download music, itunes seems to have updated my phone but not my music and it is no where to be found

i am missing music from my computer and iphone - i plugged in my phone earlier this week to download purchased music. when i looked at my phone it updated all information on my phone but my music was missing along with apps - i have no music at all and only the very recent songs i purchased are on my computer in my itunes account - i cannot find my previously purchased songs.

You'll have to update your OS on your Macbook.
Click on the black Apple logo at the top left of your Mac screen. Then click on Software Update.
support.apple.com/kb/ht1338

How can I force Itunes to show me the missing music in my library?

How can I force Itunes to show me the missing music in my library? Somwhere I found that if you Select all, Ctrl-I it would do it. But it did not help. I need to find the broken ones! Help!

Create a new, regular playlist named All music.
Drag everything under Library > Music to this playlist.
Create a new Smart playlist.
Match all rules;
Playlist is Music
Playlist is not All music. This contains all songs that cannot be found

TS3430 Missing music, I had close to 700 songs and now there is only in the 300's

NOT ABLE TO LOCATE MISSING SONGS ? I 'm running Windows 8 , I've tried to do a search for Music folders, also searched in ITunes , looked in my recycle Bin "NOTHING"
before my music went missing I was trying to download load music into my Ipod nano, which was un successful. it seems to be most of all my Beatle's songs
Please help me to find the missing music.
Thank you

Thanks - having looked up XFA I now understand this so have to ask a supplementary but important question before I consider spendign more money - if I had a tablet with Windows 8.1 installed would Adobe reader be able to open an XFA file on that or is it a problem across all versions on mobile platforms?

Can't find my music in FCPX

I downloaded a tune from a CD that I want to audition. The file shows up in finder in Music and plays on the computer with no problem. When I try to find it in FCPX in the Music & Sound Browser though it's nowhere to be found. I expect I've missed something obvious but what escapes me. Any suggestions?

Thanks Tom. Once again you've given me a solution. I really appreciate that you share your expertise here.
As you suggested the import function lets me bring in that file. Is there a way to get that to show up in the listing FCPX uses with the Music & Sound Browser? I don't use iTunes and prefer to stay away from it.

ITunes doesn't find my music files on external drive anymore

I have some 15.000 music files on an external hard drive. I added them to my iTunes library and added also a lot of extra info (titles, genres, albums covers, etc.).
After a great New Year's Party, where several people "played" with my iTunes playlists, for some reason iTunes doesn't sees / recognises the music files on the external hard drive anymore.
What can I do? I don't want to import the music files all over again. Otherwise I loose all the info I added in the past year. And it is undoable to find the music files one-by-one on the external drive. That would take months.
Who can help?

Select one track in your library that is currently missing in action. Press CTRL-I to Get Info then look at the Where: entry on the Summary tab. You should get something along the lines of:
file://localhost/<path 1>/<Artist>/<Album>/## <Name>.<ext>
e.g. file://localhost/D:/iTunes/iTunes Music/Arcade Fire/Funeral/01 Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).mp3
The true path will be something else of the form:
<path 2>\<Artist>\<Album>\## Name.<ext>
e.g. D:\iTunes\iTunes Music\Music\Arcade Fire\Funeral\01 Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).mp3
Comparing the two paths should reveal what needs to be done to put music back where iTunes "expects" to find it. The examples show the different default locations before and after the upgrade to iTunes Media Organisation. I've seen problems before with the way iTunes manages this upgrade so that it occasionally reorganizes the files but then carries on looking for them in the old location. It is also surprising how easy it is sometimes to accidentally move a folder without noticing. Alternatively Windows may simply have switched the drive letter for your external drive. Windows Media Player is more resilient in these circumstances.
If you can give the two locations for a sample file I can probably suggest what will need doing to put things right.
tt2

Finding missing music....

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