Music plays in iTunes, but Finder doesn't show them

Okay this is wierd and I don't know if it belongs to iTunes or to HFS+.
When I start iTunes, I can see my whole library of about 50'000 songs. In the finder, at the same time, I see maybe 30 or 40 artists, way less than I have songs. Now, say, for example, in iTunes, I see "a-ha" as artist. In the finder windows that shows the directory where my music is, I don't see a-ha. Now, if I do a Get Info on a song of a-ha, suddenly, a-ha appears in the Finder. With exactly this album and exactly this song. If I Get Info of another song, that one appears too. Funny enough, with the correct creation dates and everything, as if that song always there and from there after, it is there. But not before. I do a daily backup to another disk (just copying, no mirroring), funny enough, that other disk behaves exactly the same: it doesn't show my music anymore.
If I open a terminal console, its the same: I don't see anything anymore there, but the according to Disk Utility, the amount of items on that disk is about correct. Does anyone have a clue what's happening here? I already verified both disks, no errors. They are attached using USB and each is part of a single 3TB concantenated RAID.

Sounds to me like you might have disk directory problems. Try using disk utility to repair the disk (use repair instead of verify - just in case). If not, you might want to buy and try diskwarrior.
Have you tried rebooting? If not, try that first.
Also, try "right clicking" (or control-clicking) on a song, and select show in finder from the drop down menu - is the file where you think it should be?

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Music plays in iTunes, but NONE of the MP3 files are visible in Explorer

This one is a bit of a mystery.
When I open up any of the folders in my iTunes Music folder, they appear to be empty. No MP3 files are listed at all. Yet, iTunes can still play the music.
Here are the details:
1. I keep my iTunes media content on an external hard drive, and iTunes is working fine. Some albums have disappeared but most of my music shows up in iTunes and plays properly. Therefore, the music files have to be there.
2. When I right-click on my iTunes folder in Windows Explorer and choose "properties" I get a result: Explorer scans the folder and tells me I have 98.8 gigabytes in 18,279 files, (though when I look around, I see that a LOT of albums are missing). Yet, Windows Explorer is finding a lot of files even though I can’t see them.
3. However, when I right-click on a folder inside my iTunes folder and choose “properties” (the folders for each artist and for each album are still there and still visible) I get weird results. It says that there is some small amount of data in each folder (27 kilobytes or 35 kilobytes) and some random number of files (2, or 5, or 6). It doesn't matter how many songs are actually on that album, it just gives me this small unrelated number. Yet, I can’t see any files listed at all.
4. Under the View tab in Folder Options, everything looks fine to me. I don’t see a setting there that would hide MP3 files.
5. I tried checking “show hidden files” and all that sort of thing, but nothing changed.
6. I did a virus scan and it revealed no threats.
7. I also went into the Command Prompt and used the dir command to see what was there. I could see all of my folders including my iTunes music folder. I have pictures, Word documents, Excel files, etc on this external folder as well. I can see all of these files no problem. I can also see all the Artist and Album folders in my iTunes music folder. However, even using the dir command, I can’t see any songs – there are no MP3 files visible. I reveal hidden and system files (dir /ah), I then see some files like these:
desktop.ini
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
Folder.jpg
8. I tried to play the music from VLC media player and Windows Media Player, but that doesn’t work because the files can’t be seen by those programs either.
9. However, when I open iTunes, all the music is there and playable. Only iTunes sees the music.
Anyone have any idea what could have happened? The one thing I changed recently is that I ran the iTunes Genius function. It scanned my music and did what it was supposed to do, and it worked fine. I doubt that Genius could have done this to my external hard drive. I’m guessing I picked up a computer virus somehow, but my virus scan doesn’t reveal anything.
Anyone have any ideas about what is going on?
Thanks!
Doug

OMG!!!!!!!!!!
You were absolutely right, Rob. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. I've got nearly 200 Artist folders with 1,000 or so Album folders - and they are all completely empty of music.
But in the middle of that long list of folders, there is an innocuous looking folder labelled "Music." I looked inside that folder and, bam, there they were - all 92 gigabytes of my missing music files in a complete copy of all those Artist and Album folders.
I thought I was going crazy! How could iTunes be playing all this music when as far as I could tell, it had all vanished? But there it was. As you said, iTunes had simply moved it down a level in the folder hierarchy and then didn't delete all the original folders.
And as I scanned the original list of Artist folders, I also saw the other folders: Podcasts, Audiobooks, iPod Games, etc. I hadn't even noticed them before. I just assumed that all the folders I was looking at were Artist folders.
Thank you so much, Rob. I'm not sure I would have ever solved this "case of the missing music files" on my own. I would have continued to bang my head against "hidden files" settings and all that. Perhaps I would have tracked these files down by looking for their location using "Get Info" in iTunes. But maybe not. I had no reason to suspect that I didn't know where the music files were: after all, the Artist and Album folders were all right there. They were just empty! I was so focused on the folders being empty, it never occured to me that iTunes had created exact duplicate folders somewhere else.
Do you know if iTunes had any practical reason for leaving all those empty folders behind? I'm just wondering if it is safe to manually delete them. I noticed, for example, that they aren't completely empty. They contain hidden files of Album Art and various ini files. I wouldn't want to delete them and then find out that I just deleted all my album art and a bunch of important settings files.
Thanks again. You saved my neck with this one.
Doug

Music plays in iTunes, but not on iPod

Bought an iPod Classic 120GB recently. Roughly half of my music will play on the iPod, but all of it plays on my PC. I have resynced multiple times and actually traded it in through the Apple store thinking that might be a quick fix. Still the problem persists. For example, some songs on an album will play, while others will be skipped. All are encoded the same way, V0. When I convert into another bitrate, the problem goes away, but I'm not going to be doing that to my entire music library. The iPod classic does advertise being able to play variable bitrate encoding, so I'm wondering if there is any fix for this problem.

Usually unchecking the song(s) in iTUnes, updating the ipod, then checking the songs and updating the ipod again will fix the problem.
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Mac OS X 10.5.8
iTunes 10.5
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Thanks!

Try using EasyFind utility to reveal the files.
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Show In Finder will usually not only open the directory but also leave the actual file highlighted.

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My issue is not as dire as most here but still....
Recently, my purchased music became unavailable to
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Hey, everybody. My Photoshop unexpectedly quit, so I restarted my G5 (10.4)
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got the mac os x install disc and started up on that tried to repair disk but got an error:
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I can use IE to see my backup files at Carbonite but Firefox doesn't show them. I talked with carbonite and we found it worked on everything accept firefox.

After creating a Carbonite back up account I was able to get my files displayed in their view files window. But now they don't display. After checking to see if the files show up on IE they do. So something has changed in Firefox. I tried starting firefox in safe mode but that didn't help either.
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Sounds to me like you might have disk directory problems. Try using disk utility to repair the disk (use repair instead of verify - just in case). If not, you might want to buy and try diskwarrior.
Have you tried rebooting? If not, try that first.
Also, try "right clicking" (or control-clicking) on a song, and select show in finder from the drop down menu - is the file where you think it should be?

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When I go to plug in my iPhone 5 to my PC it will charge my phone but it doesn't show up that it's connected to my computer or in iTunes. I have tried just about everything that I can find in the support discussions but nothing has worked. Any other suggestions?

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hi
like my subject line states, i transferred a whole bunch of music videos off of dvd into mp4 format using videora.
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i transferred about 400 or so at the same time to ipod do you think that's why most of them won't play ?
should i do it one by one ?
thanks.

it's more than just the mp4 format. They need to be encoded correctly with the right dimensions and other attributes as well. I don't bother with this sort of thing right now. If there is anyone who has these specs, just post them here. Otherwise, you can always google them or search these boards for the proper format/size/encoding.

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I put video clips together and added music off of iTunes
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what is wrong. It plays as I made it on iMovie

Thank you all for your replies. Here is what i ended up doing. I cannot afford any 3rd party software so i went to itunes and manually entered all my playlists. As I had indicated my purchased music was on my new computer just not the playlists and I could not sync my ipod. After I rebuilt all my playlists I tried to restore my ipod to factory defaults/new. All of the steps called for in apple support and elsewhere were not available to me. I connected my ipod, went to my computer, right clicked my ipod, and formatted. That wiped my ipod so when I connected to itunes it then gave me a restore option. I did the restore and all is good in the empire again. I can now buy new music and sync my ipod so I am a happy camper.
Thanks to all.

Music plays in iTunes, but Finder doesn't show them

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