Periodically, I’ll do a sync of my iPod Touch and I’ll get a popup saying “did not transfer such-and-such because it could not be found”. Always one of my Audible audiobooks. I’ll check, and about half of them have that icon saying “couldn’t find the file”.
So I’ll go to locate the file and it will turn out that under that author’s name, there’s a folder named “unknown folder” - and the file is in that. I navigate into the folder, double-click on the file name, and voila, it’s moved to a folder with the book’s name - and the unknown folder goes away.
I have to repeat this for all the munged up books (which is not all, just about half).
Then all is fine, until a few weeks later I have to do it all over again.
The snarky answer is that iTunes is by far the worse piece of software ever conceived.
More practically, do you access the audiobooks with another program? iTunes tries and usually fails to maintain it’s internal library from some bizarre voodoo that incorporates the file’s meta-tags, lookups to it’s online databases and file names. When you buy things from iTunes store it usually works ok. When you import files that your ripped yourself or bought through another service it frequently gags on it. Also iTunes can be set to manage your files for you ( and is by default) which can often introduce problems as it battles with other programs to name and rename the same file over and over. I suspect this is your issue.
I don’t use Audible but I suspect that there’s an Audible client that accesses and renames the files causing iTunes to not be able to find them again when reopened. Long story short, iTunes sucks and fights it’s user every step of the way.
Yeah - iTunes is great… except when it isn’t. Really, except for the audiobooks, it’s been flawless for me.
I don’t access those audiobooks via any other software. I do have iTunes set to manage files so some renaming might be happening, but interestingly I haven’t touched any of those particular books (and it’s always the same ones), even to listen to, in ages.
Actually, now that you mention it, I do need to try an experiment. My kids have separate computer users, but we all have our iTunes libraries pointing to the same file location. The libraries are in the various “my documents” but the music files themselves are just in a folder on the c:\ drive. This way, if I purchase something, they can access and “import” the music into their library, ditto if they purchase something. Maybe somehow that step is causing the problems.
All users on the same computer. All our music is in c:\Itunes\Itunes Music (or something like that). The subfolders to that are the usual “by artist name”. The iTunes ‘library’ files (the XML files etc.) are separate; each of us has our own files under our own users.
I scan their libraries using the File/Add Folder to Library function, then select the “iTunes Music” folder. It spins through everything, and 5 minutes later I have a few new songs in my library.
Then each of us syncs our various iPods to our own libraries under our own users, while giving us access to each other’s music.