ITunes Can't find Some Songs?

Hey guys - I had my Ext HD damaged and had to get a new one. I had my library and everything else important backed up (I keep all files on an ext HD to keep my computer HD free of crap). I didn't lose anything. When I opened iTunes and directed it to my new location it failed to find about 1/3 of my library. It looks like all of my data including ratings, play counts, etc are all there. The only issue is when I get to a song it can't find I have to manually direct it back to that file. What confuses me is it had no problem with songs in the same album, so they are in the same file. It seems very arbitrary as to what it did and did not locate.
My question is, I can go through each song individually and point iTunes towards it. There has to be a way to do this in bulk. Anyone have an idea? There seems to be no problem with the library, files, folders, etc.
Thanks for the help.

I had the exact same problem. My iTunes library was on an external drive. It was working just fine. Then there were some problems with the external drive, so I got a new external drive and loaded the entire iTunes library onto it.
I used iTunes preferences to direct it to the iTunes folder on the new external drive. Then I pressed the Option key while starting up iTunes to also redirect it to the iTunes folder on the external because (for reasons I can't fathom) setting the folder location in preferences wasn't enough.
I have the same problem as zblom (original poster) - but only with about 5% of the songs in my library. About 95% of my songs have no problem. But there's an exclamation point next to about 5% of them, and when I try to play them, iTunes says it can't find the file. I've navigated my way to a few of the songs and then iTunes can find it. But I don't want to do that for about 300 songs - that would take hours.
Any ideas what causes this? And (more importantly) any suggestions for how to get iTunes to recognize the location of those songs with the exclamation points?

Similar Messages

ITunes can't find some songs - can anybody help?

(I'm reposting this question because the thread it was in was marked as "Answered" - but it wasn't answered, and nobody was replying.)
My iTunes library was on an external drive, and it was working just fine. Then there were some problems with the external drive, so I bought a new external drive and loaded the entire iTunes library onto it. (I followed Apple's instructions for doing this.)
I set preferences to use the iTunes folder on the new external drive. When I launched iTunes, all the music appears, as do all of the playlists that I created. It looked like everything was OK with the new hard drive - until I looked more closely and saw exclamation points next to some of the songs in my music library.
Here is the problem: iTunes says it "can't find" the locations of about 5% of the songs in my library (that's about 300 songs). Those are the songs with the exclamation points next to them. When I try to play them, iTunes says it can't find the file.
If I click on one of the "lost" songs to try to play it, iTunes presents a dialog box that lets me navigate my way to that song to show iTunes where it is, and then iTunes can play it. Theoretically this is a solution, but I don't want to do that for about 300 songs - it would take hours.
All of the "lost" songs are in my iTunes music folder. There doesn't seem to be anything unusual or unique about the lost songs.
I searched Apple's support pages for help on this, and I searched this forum (iTunes for Mac), and I couldn't find an answer. It looks like a fairly common problem - I see other posts with similar problems, but I haven't seen a solution yet.
Any ideas what causes this? And (more importantly) any suggestions for how to get iTunes to recognize the location of those songs with the exclamation points?

The suggestions that I received didn't solve my problem, but they did result in a duplication of my entire library - and I didn't relish the thought of deleting 6100 duplicate songs, one-by-one. I finally solved both problems by rebuilding the iTunes library. It was pretty easy to do, and it cleaned things up quite well.
There is an Apple tech support document that describes how to do this, but it's a bit hard to find. If you search for "rebuild iTunes library", you won't find it. You have to search for "re-create iTunes library" with a hyphen stuck in the middle of the word recreate. Then you will find this link...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451
...which guides you step-by-step through the process of rebuilding the iTunes library. This got rid of duplicates, it re-established broken links, and it found a few songs that for some reason had not been in the previous library.

ITunes can't find some songs after update

So I've read a bit about this and it's happened to me now. I did the recent iTunes upgrade and now random song files can't be found. The " ! "shows up here and there. Now when I search for that particular song, I can find and play it. It's just that maybe it was renamed or something? I cannot manually do this since I have almost 40,000 songs on a separate HD. 99% ripped from my CD collection.
Why or how does this happen? I've been adding to my iTunes HD for 7 years or so and this was the first time this has happened.
Anyway I read a few suggestions and so I just deleted all the music from itunes BUT saved the files and now adding all of them back which will probably take 10-15 hours. It says "organizing files" wil it's a very long haul.
Will this work and will iTunes then again know where all of my songs are?

Well I researched and had to "delete" the 40,000 songs from my itunes list BUT saved the files. It took 20 hours for them to repair and then were fixed in one place with no "!" What a pain.

ITunes Can't Find SOME Songs on External HD

I have over 29,000 songs on an external hard drive (I drive). For no reason that I can determine, about half of the songs in my library suddenly have an ! next to them. Clicking on these songs gives me the "file not found" message. When I search for the song, it IS on my hard drive, and once I click on that song, it plays with no problem.
I haven't done the math....but if I have to do this for EVERY individual song that has the ! icon....it's going to take me forever!!
Any way to "refresh" your entire library on your hard drive at one time so that iTunes once again recognizes them?

Same exact problem here!!--15,000 songs on an external hard drive and well over half are inaccessible. Interestingly, the "file not found" message seems to be album specific (i.e., if a given song file is not found, all the songs in that albums folder are also not found). I haven't as yet checked out whether this issue applies to all albums for a given artist. Like the original poster, the prospect of having to re-locate each individual song is more than a little daunting. I too am looking for some way to properly restore all song linkages en masse.

Itunes can not find original song file

Suddenly my itunes can not find the song's original file.
I see that the file is on the driver but when I double click on Itunes I get this mesage:
"the song could not be used because the original file could not be found.
Any helpers out there?
THKS

I've been experiencing this problem for a while now. It happens with version 7.1 but it started with an earlier version of iTunes 7. I never experienced it before iTunes 7. In my experience the number of files iTunes "thinks" is missing increases with the length of time iTunes has been running between restarts (I usually just put my system to sleep overnight so it can "run" for days on end). When it first started happening I used to go and find the "missing" music file(s) and reconnect it(them). Then, one day, I found a flood of "missing" songs. I decided I had nothing to lose by stopping iTunes and restarting it. When I restarted iTunes none of my songs were missing! This indicated to me that it's the iTunes code that's active after a restart that has a bug that makes it lose track of the music files.
To check, I looked in the Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml file for songs while they were being reported as "missing", and, lo and behold, the song file locations are still there. iTunes must reread the xml file when it starts up and this cures the problem, at least in my case. (Too bad it doesn't use the file while it's running.)
I usually just play my entire library in random order. So, if a song or two disappears, I'm rarely aware of it. All I've been doing lately is stopping and starting iTunes when I feel like getting rid of the "!" scourge.

ITunes can not find orignal songs

iTunes is saying it can not find orignal songs. The ones it can not find are all the songs I put on there from my Cd collection. Having taking the time 3yrs ago to put them all on itunes I do not want to do that again. So itunes does not fully sync with my ipod. Also that means I can not create a play list with any of those songs.

Unfortunately you will either have to locate the files for those songs on your Hard Drive or re-import them to iTunes. There are however several steps you can take to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
1. In iTunes go to Edit > Preferences
2. Choose the Advanced tab in the Preference window
3. Under General their will be a option to check "Copy file to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" select that
4. Exit the window by pressing OK
Also you will want to consolidate your iTunes library to reduce future loss of other files currently in iTunes. By consolidating your files it will place a copy of all of them inside your iTunes folder on your Hard Drive. To consolidate your library use the following steps in iTunes.
1. Advanced > "Consolidate Library..."
2. A warning dialog will appear stating "Consolidating your library will copy all of your music into the iTunes music folder. This cannot be undone" Press "Consolidate"
iTunes will copy all your files to the iTunes Music folder. This will NOT copy any of the files that it cannot find though.

Pls help- iTunes can't find my songs on NAS, can't sync iPod (error -50)

Hi-
I’m having serious trouble with my iTunes. FYI I have Windows XP and iTunes ver 8.1 and Ipod 80GB classic. Last month I attached a Buffalo NAS device to my machine and exported my songs to the device. It worked without a hitch for a few weeks, until recently (maybe it has something to do with my importing videos from my Tivo, since the problem happened shortly after that). Yes I went to “preferences > advanced” and used the proper drive letter/location.
Suddenly, several weeks later, my itunes had trouble finding the songs, and beside each one I got a little exclamation point next to the song title with the following error message: “could not be used because the original file cannot be found.” I went to the thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7158063 and did what was recommended, to no avail. I also tried recreating the itunes library as follows: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451 but it did not work. I’m not sure what else to do.
Also, I tried to sync the iPod and I got error message that it could not be synced “an unknown error occurred (-50). I already restored the iPod, to no avail.
Please help.
Thanks
Bill

Yeah, I had the same problem. Just follow the instructions on this page:
http://www.mp3.com/news/stories/1828.html
definitely better than linking it song by song.
peace.

ITunes Can't Find Some of My Songs & Videos

My old G4 was filling up with song files, so I moved my iTunes Music over to an External WD Firewire Drive and all was well. Yesterday I migrated over to an Intel iMac, connected the drive and fired up iTunes and music filled my room. Then I clicked a few titles and noticed an exclamation point next to some of them and error box pops up indicating that iTunes could not find the files and would I like to look for them.
These songs are indeed on my external drive and can be played in a preview and even dragged into the iTunes application and are now playable. Problem is I'm finding hundreds of these now and I don't know until I try to manually play them. My destination in preferences points to the external drive, I've authorized my computer (some are purchased, some not) and I have an up to date iTunes.
I'm kind of stumped as to what is going on. Any solutions you can pass my way would be appreciated.
Steve

so my itunes for some reason cannot locate any of my 2000 songs that ive had for the past 4 years. They all come up with little exclamation points!! recently, i went to an apple store and had one of the mac genuises answer some questions, one which was why i had duplicate songs in my itunes library? all was well, and he said it probably had to do with the fact that i had redownloaded them on a my new harddrive. He then proceeded to go through my harddrive and said i should delete all the music files because its taking up harddrive space, and all i needed was the music thats on in itunes - basicaoly he said i had extra copies that i did not need, so at the mac store i deleted them all. so heres where my problem starts, i empty the trash at home - try to play music - then all my music files pop up with exclamation points, nothing will play, and i cant find any of the orginal files which were on the hard drive!! i have no music now, bc some mac genius told me to delete the extra files!!!!!!! so my question is WHAT SHOULD I do now?????
sorry - but eversince mac has monopolized the industry - i have nothing but problems with inconsistent information....... i am advocate of macs - but im getting frustrated when i drive an hour to a mac store with a purchased 100 dollar pro care card - and get the wrong info....which screws me!!!

Itunes can't copy some songs to my ipod

So I keep getting a warning from itunes that it can't copy 3 songs from my library to my ipod. This is what the error says word for word.
"Some of the items in the iTunes library were not copied to the iPod because one or more errors occurred." It than lists the 3 songs that weren't transfered. The weird thing is that they songs were originally on my ipod but since I lowered the bitrate of all my songs, now they can't be on my ipod. It's weird because I've never had this issue until I changed the bitrate. And the songs that are giving me troubles are songs from different albums and different means of getting them. One was from a CD, the other from digital download and the other was from iTunes it's self. So... their good songs and I miss listening to them. What do I do?

Hello the_atm
If the songs are having issues syncing to your iPod, see if you can create a new version of the songs in either MP3 or AAC format and then sync it across again. You said one of the songs was a purchase from iTunes, try deleting the songs and then download it again if it will not convert.
iTunes: How to convert a song to a different file format
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1550
How to delete content you've downloaded from the iTunes Store, App Store, iBooks Store, or Mac App Store
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5772
Download past purchases
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2519
Regards,
-Norm G.

Can't find some songs

I have imported all of my music and organized it in ITUNES, but when I look under the artist name not all of the songs are displayed. However, when I select "songs" from the menu, I am able to find the songs and play them (with the artists' names displayed). How do I get all of the artists' songs to appear under each individual artist name? Thanks for the help!
IPOD 5g with video Windows XP

Sometimes ID Tag information doesn't carry over correctly. To change any tag information, right click on the song, choose Get Info and then Info. In this box you can add or change, title, artist, album. genre etc.
For other iTunes information, this is the iTunes support page: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/howto/

ITunes can't find my songs after transfer

I recently transfered my entire iTunes library to my Mac G4 (Tiger) via my iPod classic. After the transfer I held 'Option' down when opening iTunes and chose my new .itl folder. When iTunes opened up, all my music/videos were there, but when I went to play them, I noticed that every single one had a little gray exclamation point in front of them. It said something about not being able to find the song when I tried to play it and asked me to specify where to find it. So did this whole procedure and finally honed in on the song I wanted and it played. But I really don't want to do that for every single thing in my library. Is there an easy way to tell iTunes where all my music can be found?

Create a new iTunes library and drag the old iTunes library from the Finder into the open iTunes window. Playlists and other metadata won't be preserved.
(36962)

ITunes "can't find" certain songs when I sync my phone

When I sync my iPhone with iTunes, I get an error message saying that certain songs cannot be synced because they cannot be found, and yet, there they are on my phone! I've tried deleting the songs from my iTunes library, and then adding them back in, to no avail. There is a check box that tells iTunes to stop showing the error, but I'd rather solve the problem than pretend there isn't one. Besides, what if, at some time, there really is a problem that I want called to my attention? My phone is an iPhone 4s, and I'm running the latest version of iTunes on my Windows 7 computer, but this happened even with my old iPhone 3 and on previous versions of iTunes. It's not such a tremendous problem as to have a significant negative impact the life of an average person, but I've tried for years to figure this out on my own, and I've got nothing! I've even gone through my library line by line (this is in excess of 500 songs), looking for those little exclamation points that say there's a problem. I can safely say that I have none of those.

I subsequently answered this issue for myself, and now I feel a little foolish. In my case, it turned out to have nothing to do with the songs themselves, but with ringtones I'd created from those songs. When I looked under "Tones", I saw the exclamation points all over the place, and multiple copies of the "problem" ringtones (probably due to my repeated downloading of them). Now, I put all of the ringtones I created in a single folder in the music library of my computer and so, should iTunes have this issue again, I'll know just where to tell it to look.
By the way, if anybody doesn't know how, and is interested in making their own ringtones, I learned here: http://osxdaily.com/2010/09/04/make-free-iphone-ringtones-in-itunes-10/

Itunes can't find my songs

I have my music split between an external hard drive and my computers hard drive (about 2/3 on the external HD). Last week my itunes decided to 'organise' my files, and has now lost the sync between some of the songs on itunes, and the actual files. It asks me to locate file, which i can do manually, but I have a lot of music and don't want to have to keep adding each individual track.
To complicate matters, I have also bought a bigger external hard drive, which I want to move all my music to, consolidating both folders. I know there is a way of doing this, but don't want to lose my playlists, ratings, etc. Someone also mentioned that this might be the reason itunes lost the link to some of my songs, as it changed the hard drive letter.
Would there also be a way of killing two birds with one stone and moving both folders to the new external HD and getting itunes to organise it?
Don't really know what to do, as I am relatively illiterate when it comes to computers!
Any help would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Jules

Hey Jules, I've encountered a problem like yours when I did a stupid thing and changed the letter name (i:/, etc) on my backup harddrive. Basically, the short answer to your question is "no." Sorry! There is no way to preserve your playlists and ratings because you have changed the actual location of your files...unless you move them back to where they were originally (original hard drive, folder, whatever) you're outta luck! My advice for you - would be to move all your music to one place, NEVER move it again, and then re-install iTunes and have it search that particular hard drive so that it will organize everything again. After that, you can make new playlists. Or, if you just want to add a folder of music to your library from another hard drive, you could either change the folder location, or you can choose Add Folder to Library from the file menu like so:
To change the folder location in Windows iTunes:
Go to Edit
Select Preferences
Select the Advanced tab
Select Change next to iTunes Music Folder Location
I'm sorry, I know this is definitely not cool - maybe someone else has another suggestion - but I've done searches on the forums for this before and this is pretty much it! G'luck...

ITune can;t find my songs

I have a library of over 400 songs all with ratings which I have spent lots of time on. I moved the folder containing all of my songs to a seperate hard drive, and now in my library most of my songs have a "!" beside them. How can I tell iTune where the rest of my songs have gone, without hacing to do eahc one individually, and without hacing to "re-rate" them?

are your songs on a seperate or external hard drive?
I have a library of over 400 songs all with ratings
which I have spent lots of time on. I moved the
folder containing all of my songs to a seperate hard
drive, and now in my library most of my songs have a
"!" beside them. How can I tell iTune where the rest
of my songs have gone, without hacing to do eahc one
individually, and without hacing to "re-rate" them?

Where in itunes can i find my songs i converted to mp3 format?

I followed the steps to convert one of my playlists to mp3 format for a swimming device. I watched itunes convert it track, however I cannot find MP3 version.
Any ideas?

Hi,
Go into song view and do a search on the song title. Alternatively go to menu > view > show duplicates.
When you convert a track it goes into main library - does not stay in playlist.
Jim

ITunes Can't find Some Songs?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for