How can I download my past purchases that are not in my icloud? Somehow I lost songs that I purchased they say that the orginal files are gone but I did not delete them

Question

How can I download past purchases that are not in my icloud?  Somehow I lost songs it says that the orginal files can not be located.  They are still available in the store but it doesn't give me the option to download them.  I did not delete any songs or files but I am missing a lot of files

Answer 1

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, 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 cancel when asked to try 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.
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.
If you have to resort to trying to pull back the library from your iPod see Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device.
Note also that if iTunes has an entry for a song, even if that entry is broken, then it won't offer that track for download since it "thinks" you already have it. If you can't find the original files or recover them from a device, then you may need to delete the broken entries, close iTunes and reopen before you can access the past purchases.
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