All Ms. Napier’s iTunes files from last winter are missing from her PC and backups (but still on iPod itself, and still listed in the iTunes library pane). Why? How to recover?
So last Christmas I bought Ms. Napier an iPod and we downloaded and installed iTunes. We copied a few CDs and bought a few tunes from the iTunes Store. As far as I can remember we used defaults for all our choices and there was nothing weird about it, but my memory isn’t all that trustworthy. Then she didn’t touch it for several months, and now we’re trying to get going again, copied a couple more CDs and bought several more tunes from the Store.
But now when we try to play (or do anything else with) music we bought or loaded last winter, we get this error message:
The song “Annoying Napier with Cheezy Christmas Tripe” could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"
Everything we did recently works fine.
Various searches of her PC (a fairly new Dell laptop running WinXP) including Recycle and our various network drives and backups using words in the song titles turn up zero. The iTunes user interface shows them in the library as expected. I’m not that smart about iTunes but think it all looks like we carefully tracked down every last music file and folder, and deleted it using Windows Explorer, without opening iTunes. Which of course we did not do, at least not intentionally.
WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?
I suspect maybe something weird about user folders and library locations. In iTunes Preferences > Advanced I see the iTunes Media folder location is set to c:\Documents and Settings\ADMIN\My Documents\My Music\iTunes Media. The option Keep iTunes Media folder organized is checked, and the option Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library is not checked.
I wondered about “ADMIN” and not “Msnapier”, so I hunted around with Windows Explorer and see the following folder structure (this is a partial list):
Documents and Settings
ADMIN
Application Data
Desktop
My Documents
Downloads
My Music
iTunes
Frank Sinatra
Summer Wind.whatever
New York New York.whatever
All Users
Default User
Msnapier10
10fun
10photo
Household
Genealogy
MsNapierWork10
OfficePhoneList
My Music
Interestingly, there is no Documents and Settings\Msnapier or any other Msnapier without the 10 appended. She does have the username “msnapier”. I think she does some kind of spring cleaning that involves getting rid of Msnapier## to various backups and somehow creating a new Msnapier##+1, but am hazy about this process. When she describes what she does it’s unclear, and she confuses files versus folders versus drives versus applications, so there are practically no guarantees here. I included the backup volumes in my search for song titles with no hits. She does have admin rights (it seems practically impossible to be a Windows user without them).
If she had erased the folder iTunes was using for its library location, and then we opened iTunes and started buying from the store (without having listened to anything in her library), could iTunes have discovered the location was unavailable and chosen a different one, without having shown any warnings or errors? I am flat out certain that we did not go in and change that preference manually in iTunes!
What can I do to figure this out and/or satisfy ourselves that content isn’t going to keep disappearing?
HOW DO WE RECOVER?
The best news, perhaps, is that the iPod itself still contains all last winter’s music, and played a few just fine. We have not plugged it in or synced it since last winter (it’s charging on a standalone charger right now). I did find an iTunes preference to disallow automatic syncing of iPods when they are plugged in, and turned that on, but don’t know how else to take advantage of the situation. I think what would be great is if we could copy everything from the iPod back into iTunes, and also of course copy (sync) the new things from iTunes to the iPod. But some casual searching didn’t tell me how to do this, and I would fear there might be copy protection or other impediments. For the record, we are scrupulous about paying for our music and there’s not the slightest attempt to deny anyone’s intellectual property rights here.
How can I get the iPod contents back into iTunes?
Thanks!