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

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Is there not an easier way to find missing songs?

Is there a smarter way to find missing songs and albums besides having to go through each one individually? Some kind of batch process would be nice...
How do you guys efficiently find missing songs or albums?

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

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

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.

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.

When trying to locate songs in my iTunes library, often when I find the song it asks me if I would like it to find other missing files. Sometimes it can't find other missing songs. How do I make sure that it is looking at all of my hard dirves?

Locating missing songs in my iTunes library. How do you make sure that all drives are being looked at for the missing songs?

To import music into your iTunes library on the computer go to iTunes>Help>iTunes Help>Add items to iTunes and follow the instructions
Delete the "songs" that do not play in your iTunes library and reimport them.

How can I relink my missing songs in iTunes?

Hi,
I´m a bit panicking since now 1000 songs on my iTunes library aren´t being located by my iTunes... What happened is that I had to reinstall my MacBook Pro after it crashed, and my network drive failed, so no possibility of Timemachining it. Fortunately I had a second manual copy of all my data on another external hard drive, but here´s the problem:
Even though I did all right when switching from PC to Mac a while ago with iTunes (did consolidate library and allowed iTunes to keep it organized), it turns that I now have two folders for my music, on iTunes Media and iTunes Music, and my music library split in both.
I have copied all files from Music to Media, and tried to let iTunes find other missing links in the same folder (Media), but it doesn´t seem to work - it never finds them, even though they´re there, and in theory, in the same config that they were in the Music folder (as this one appears to be also organized). Tried to reboot library with option-down, and unchecking both keep it organized and copy files, but nothing worked. Also tried to have iTunes looking at the Music folder for the library, but this way it wouldn´t find the songs either.
I did edit the iTunes Library xml file, and replace all iTunes%20Music for iTunes%Media, in the hope that´ll fix it, but somehow, even Dreamweaver finds and replaces all, and I save the file, every time I open the xml again it does appear as unchanged (that´s to say, still with the iTunes%20Music references).
Can you please help me? The thought of having to manually locate 1000 songs keeps me awake at night...
Thanks!!!

Look at the FAQ here http://www.apple.com/itunes/content-providers/music-faq.html consider the "aggregators" they will assist with the process for a fee.

How to find a song quickly in ncmpcpp

Hi
I've been trying to figure it out if it is possible to find a song in the playlist by artist and title or any other tag. Something similar to how Sonata filters the playlist.
If I search for 'one' I get hundreds of results even tough I only want the U2 song. I know I can search by tags in Search engine but I prefer searching in the playlist. So the only "solution" I found is to first filter the playlist for 'u2' and then do the Find forward for 'one'. But it seems there has to be a better way to do this. Using regular expressions with / would be great but I haven't found any examples on how to use them properly in ncmpcpp.
Is there a way to search by multiple tags with Find forward/backward?
I can see there are a lot of people on the forum using mpd and ncmpcpp and I'm wondering how do you search quickly for a song that has one fairly common word for the title?
Thanks

So I spent some more time trying to solve this issue and I think I figured it out.
Even though I've set regular expressions to extended, I still had trouble finding the proper entries starting with 'one'.
^one.*u2 didn't return anything, at least until I've tried it in playlists column mode.
This is my playlist formating for column and classic mode:
song_columns_list_format = "(40)[white]{t} (30)[green]{a} (10)[green]{l}"
song_list_format = "{$8%t$9}|{$8%f$9} $R{$3[%a]$9}|{$3%D$9} {$3%l$9}"
It turns out that color definition in classic mode are part of the input string but in column mode they are not.
^..one.*u2 finds exactly the song I was looking for.
In the end nothing fancy, but this little thing was bugging me for a long time now and I just wanted to make an end to it all.
... now the only thing left missing is a 'Jump to' widget for awesomewm

When syncing my iTunes to my iPad from the laptop, I get a list of missing songs; they are in the library, but not in the music folder on my HD. In particular, I uploaded 3 CDs at the same time, all are in my library - but two are missing from the folder.

When syncing my iTunes to my iPad from the laptop, I get a list of missing songs; they are in the library, but not in the music folder on my HD. In particular, I uploaded 3 CDs at the same time, all are in my library, and all synced to the iPad - but the music from two of them are missing from the music folder. Questions are (a) where might they have gone? and (b) is there a way of "reverse loading" them back to my hard drive from the iPad? Thanks in advance!

Hi dones49,
It sounds like your issue here is that iTunes can not find the files for some of the songs you have brought into it. This happens occasionally even if the songs have not been moved from the location that iTunes places them on import or purchase. When you try to use the song, iTunes prompts you to find the file, as you have seen.
To find the file, use the information in this article to navigate through the iTunes media folders -
Locate and organize your iTunes files
If you are still unable to locate the files, you may need to download them from the iTunes store again, or rip them from your CDs. See this article for assistance with downloading your past purchases -
Download past purchases
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Brett L

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

Where are my missing songs

My iTunes library no longer has many of the songs that were once there. This is not my imagination. For example, I have ten versions of "Stardust" in my iPod, which were of, course, downloaded from my iTunes library. However, I now only have two versions there. This is only one example. I suspect that there may be over a hundred missing songs.
I have searched for the songs with "Spotlight, but that didn't help. Are there any other ways of searching for missing songs?
Finally, how do I find the total number of songs in my iTunes library and in my iPod Nano? I would like to see just how many missing songs there are.

Tygerlylly wrote:
To find out the number of songs in itunes, open it, and click on music and it should say the number of items in music at the bottom of the itunes window in the frame. You can also look at the song files in your itunes folder in itunes music. Then you can check and see if the actual files are there whether or not they are showing up in itunes.
I found the total number of songs thanks to you. The figures so small and out-of-the-way, that I've missed them time after time. However, I couldn't follow your next tip. I don't see any "iTunes folder," and I don't know how to access it. How do I find them?

Missing Songs Problem

I have a ton of songs in my iTunes library that have the little exclamation point next to them. I dragged the iTunes music folder to the library icon in iTunes and it made copies of all my missing songs, but I don't want to lose the play counts I had of the original copies of the songs. Is there anyway get around this or should I just suck it up and be thankful I was able to find my music?? Thanks!!

It's been an hour and no one knows? Come on...

Missing Songs in iTunes Music folder.

I recently found that I have missing files in my iTunes music folder. The missing songs seem to be random. For instance, Abby Road is missing tracks 3 and 6. My music folder is on my main hard drive and I also have a Time Capsule backup.
When I look for the songs in my backup disk, I find I have to go back as far as 4 months to restore some of them and I just now found a song that was there yesterday but gone today. This leads me to believe that a few songs are randomly being deleted every day. Anyone else with this problem?
I'm using iTunes 10.1 but apparently I've been having this problem for at least 4 months now so I believe it was an earlier version when it started happening.

redcore,
I got an answer from AppleCare on this one and it seems to be working as I have not noticed any more lost songs. The first person I talked to had never heard of this but his boss had and told me I needed to create a new iTunes music folder. This is a bit of a pain, but not as bad as going through TimeMachine to replace all the random, missing files (that part took a while).
You have to Option-click (hold option while you click) on the iTunes icon and then click "Create new library". Name it something different from your old one and then drag all your old content into the new library. You will have to do this with the music, apps, movies, etc. Also, keep in mind you will have to export all your playlist info to the new iTunes as well. I didn't export them all so I'm not sure how, or if, you can do them all at the same time. I did File/Library/Export Playlist in the old iTunes... Than had to do File/Library/Import Playlist when in the new iTunes I had created.
Hope this helps

Problem with "missing" songs after migrating from Win PC to Macbook

Hello,
I'm trying to move my daughter's iTunes library from her old Win PC to her new Macbook Pro. I mostly got it right, but there are roughly 100 songs which do not play because they cannot be found. I can click through each and "find" them for iTunes, such that they will work, but is there a way to do this globally at once?
I suspect it has something to do with "Consolidate Library", but I can't quite seem to make that work. How can I tell the Mac to search out ALL missing songs and reconnect them (or even move the files all to the iTunes folder)?
I think I should have done a “Consolidate” on the old machine first, but is there a way to salvage this without starting completely from scratch?

Authorize the computer.
iTunes Store: About authorization and deauthorization - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1420 - and another helpful post: https://discussions.apple.com/message/17828050

Finding Missing Songs

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