iTunes music files missing, library still shows them, iPod still holds them - recovery???

Factual Questions
1

All Ms. Napier’s iTunes files from last winter are missing from her PC and backups (but still on iPod itself). 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, using asterisks becaues SDMB seems to block leading spaces or tabs):

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!

2

Sorry to make things confusing. Nothing is going right today. I wound up posting this twice because spaces and tabs didn’t seem to work for my folder list above, so I substituted asterisks, and wound up with two postings. This is the one to read; the other one won’t make as much sense. My mistake!

Yes, feel free to comment on how badly I am doing with the iTunes computer problem, if I can’t post right. Especially if you have suggestions about the problem! Thanks!

3

I don’t really have an answer, but hopefully have some insight.

Where did this error message come up? When you try to double click the file in iTunes?

As far as recovery, if you bought from iTunes, will they let you dl again? As far as getting stuff off of your ipod, it depends on if it shows up in explorer when you plug it in. Usually this is if you turn on disk mode in the options first. If you do so now, it might require a sync, thus deleting your files, I’m not sure. There may also be third party programs that allow recovery.

If you can open your iPod in explorer, the songs will have weird 4-character filenames, like KJRN.mp3. However, the id3 information will be preserved, so you can find what you’re missing using the tags.

BTW, if you wanted to have spaces and tabs count as character, you would have to use a fixed-width font. Use the [ code] tag.


Spaces     5 of them
4

Sorry, I have nothing that can help you, but if it’s any comfort this has happened to me many times. A few songs here and a few song there over the just disappear; without me touching anything or doing anything, a few exclamaition marks turns up and the song is gone. The worst were when the iTunes troll had three of my four ripped Nick Cave albums vanish. I have no idea why this happened and I have not found a solution. :frowning:

5

Under ‘File’ in iTunes there is the option to ‘Transfer Purchases From iPod’ which should restore all your iTunes purchases. As thelurkinghorror said iTunes renames files if you let it so searching for them by file name may not work. Scanning the entire drive for *.mp3 would be your best bet.

iTunes had done this twice to me, both times deleting every single file from the music folder. Now I keep a backup of all my music on an external HDD in case it ever does it again.

6

I got to wondering about this. I doubt we turned on the disk mode. Do you know what happens if disk mode is off, and I plug this iPod into another computer that has never had iTunes? More importantly, would doing so somehow mess up my chance to use iTunes to transfer the purchases?

The problem shows up if I doubleclick an item to play it, or select it and look for File > Show file in Windows Explorer, or select it and Get Info. It gets marked with a persistent exclamation point then.

There seem to be third-party programs for this sort of thing, too. I’m scared of what they’ll mess up.

We have about $40 worth of downloads. Losing this wouldn’t be a disaster. Probably the bigger issue is whether the thing is trustworthy.

7

Two more tidbits -

Thanks for the suggestion about searching for .mp3 files. It’s actually .m4a, and the search comes up empty for the date range around last winter, except for…

…the other tidbit: iTunes came with several tunes already in it, and she kept two of those, and they are still there. They play, the files are searchable, and they’re in the same general area as the ones we just added.

I see Transfer purchases from iPod in the menu; maybe we’ll try that next. I hope if we have sync automatically blocked, it won’t do a sync without asking.

8

We got it! Here’s what I learned:

There is that iTunes menu item File > Transfer purchases from iPod. It doesn’t seem to do anything at all.

We could set Preferences > Prevent iPods, iPhones and iPads from syncing automatically. Then we could plug the iPod in and switch it to Enable disk use (which we hadn’t happened to do before). Then I ran off with it to another PC and copied its Music folder to a CD, brought that back, and Imported the Music folder. On the CD the files looked funny. Not only are the names short and cryptic, but also in the Explorer pane, their folder icons are grayed out. But now everything seems good. We experimented around and found nothing undesirable. I would like some time to explore the folder structure and see if it works like the others, but for now, it looks OK.

Thanks!

9

So Enable Disc Use didn’t require a sync? That’s good to know. Now you should always remove your iPod by ejecting it first, or it is said to screw up your file system.

10

Just a couple further notes that may be useful, if not now then for future reference. I just experienced something similar, though I know why it happened (power outage while computer was on and external drive apparently partially discombobulated).

“Transfer purchases from iPod” will indeed copy any purchased music from your iPod back into iTunes, but the song references in iTunes must be deleted first. To explain, iTunes keeps its list of songs even if it cannot locate the file that’s supposed to be attached to it on the disk. So when you try to transfer, it won’t do anything if the songs are still listed in your iTunes library (even if those references are invalid). The good thing about this is any songs on your iPod will not get deleted when you sync and there are invalid references in your library (they show up with a fat little exclamation point in the far-left column); it just tells you the file was not copied because it couldn’t find it, but it doesn’t remove it from the iPod. Deleting the invalid reference from your iTunes library will result in that song getting deleted from your iPod at your next sync.

Not all iPods can be set to be used as disks (no option exists for the iPhone or, I believe the iPod Touch); good for you, Napier, that that option was available. It does appear to be the easiest way to recover files. (I had to download a couple thousand or so from my Mozy backup.)

Lastly, it sounds to me as if msnapier inadvertently deleted or moved the files during one of her backups. With the option “Copy files to iTunes Media folder” unchecked, iTunes will not copy the music files to its own folder, it will simply keep a record of the file’s location, while purchased media will automatically be saved to the iTunes folder. Your purchased media will always be in the iTunes folder structure, but your own imported files may or may not be, depending on that option, and if they’ve been moved since iTunes last accessed them, it won’t know where they are (hence the offer for you to locate them). I’ve found it useful to keep that option checked, so that iTunes copies the files I import into its own file structure.

11

I just want to tack this on in the event a MAC user stumbles across this thread:

An easy option to solve this problem for MAC is Senuti (iTunes backwards). It is currently a free software for MAC that can solve this problem and do a lot of other neat things too.

Although, I think if Napier had a MAC he would probably have had to follow the advice of Just Ed.

12

No, Napier DOES have a MAC, and he doesn’t have to mess with ANY of this stuff, because things don’t go missing and screw up every time he turns around. It just WORKS.

Now, Ms. Napier, she has a PC, and so it is only out of the overabundant goodness of Napier’s heart that he is fixing it for her, and stabbing his eyes out with pencils, and so forth.

One time I selected all the tunes by clicking Edit > Select All, and another time I did it by typing CTRL-a, and her eyes welled up with hot frustration and betrayal because I’d changed how I was doing it, as she wasn’t familiar with either method. I imagine she now thinks these are advanced iTunes tricks. My point is that this was a painful process, especially because the iPod was my gift to her and she was making a second valliant attempt at learning how to use it and building confidence.

13

Three interesting points here. I presume the “Transfer purchases” did not work because I did not delete the broken references first. They oughta give you a dialog saying nothing was moved because references were there, or test their validity, or give you some other clue about that. How’d you know? I didn’t read the fine manual on this point, I admit…

The disk option was available, but not set, and I selected that Don’t automatically sync option before connecting. The status message at the top of the screen did say that it was syncing, by the way, when I did some of these things, but it was not deleting things on the iPod. This is a discrepancy; which thing is wrong depends on exactly what the definition of a sync is, but I vote that the status indicator is wrong.

I agree the Copy to iTunes folder option is better checked, and indeed did check it by late in the process. It was funny that we imported the CD full of files from the iPod into iTunes, then tried playing them to make sure it worked, and only happened to notice the faint noise of the CD drive spinning each time we played something; we checked the box and did it over and finally tested it with that CD pulled out.

Considering this was all supposed to be an automatic system, we have certainly had to do a lot of fiddling. I guess the big reason is that iTunes isn’t in charge of keeping all the files from being deleted; if vandals stole my car wheels, it wouldn’t be the car’s fault that it steered funny, either.