What the hell just happened with my music?

Last night, I opened up iTunes on my computer to throw together a playlist and was met with something odd - all of my songs gone, all of my playlists deleted. WTF? I looked and all my folders full of mp3s were still there. So I recovered my playlists from a previous library file but even then I noticed that a lot of the files were listed as missing in iTunes.

So I re-added all the songs from my library into iTunes but now I’m noticing a lot of weird stuff. There are about 50 songs at the bottom with no artist, album information, or album artwork. On top of that, probably 20-30 albums have artist information but the track names, album name, and album artwork are missing. AND, on top of that, several albums have duplicated tracks.

Then I notice that it’s not just iTunes - the actual FILES changed in Windows. For instance, my folder for Depeche Mode’s ULTRA is there but now it’s empty. There is now a folder under Depeche Mode called “Unknown Album” that contains all the tracks from ULTRA. I also notice that some tracks are duplicated - there is now a file for “Words Don’t Mean a Thing” and also for “Words Don_t Mean a Thing”.

Nothing on my computer has changed lately. I’m running Windows 7 and it may have applied a windows update recently, I don’t really remember.

Anybody have something like this happen before? Any idea what would have caused it?

Since this isn’t actually about music qua music, but rather digital files, moved from Cafe Society to IMHO.

I hate iTunes. I haven’t had this happen mysteriously without my knowledge, as happened to you. But when I tried to move a bunch of music from an old iPod to a new one (most of them burned from CDs I owned), iTunes proprietary BS forced me to jump through hoops re: file type etc. just to get them on the new iPod. NOT a simple matter of simply copying my library from the old iPod to the new. NoooOOOOoooo. Apple’s OH so helpful answer? Oh iTunes has a way to rip your CDs. ARGH, yes, I know, that’s a LOT of hours of work, I have tons of them. That’s why I wanted to simply move that work (which I already performed over years by burning for an hour or two at a time) to the new iPod, not do it all over again… Grrrrrrrrrr

Sorry, all I have is sympathy, no real answer.