Missing Music?

[anomaly]

I recently started getting errors when syncing my iPod that "some songs were not copied to the iPod because they could not be found."

I looked into it, and somehow iTunes lost it's reference to some files (about .5% of my music collection) I went through each track that was 'missing' and selected the appropriate .mp3 file, and now I don't get those messages.

This caused me to doubt the integrity of iTunes, so I looked at the collection size - iTunes reports that I'm using 12GB of my iPod, that the collection is 17GB.

What's bothersome to me is that if I look at the file system, I've got 25GB of data in my iTunes folder. How can I confirm that iTunes has all of my music without looking album by album, matching iTunes data to the filesystem visually?

Anyone else have 'missing files?"

Thanks!

Regards,
Anomaly

[Tight]

I am experiencing this problem also, and would love to see an answer from a knowledgeable source. I'm running 10.3.9. What seems to have happened is that whole albums now have a question mark next to them, and when selected an error messages let's me know that the file could not be found and do I want to locate it.

Yet I can't locate it. In the finder, under the iTunes music folder, many albums do not appear with the folder icon, yet they exist in iTunes. The missing albums do not have a folder to navigate to, to see if it is just a dropped link. Why did these albums suddenly become lost? Are they really lost, or if not, how do I find them again?

[WK CrazyHorse]

Chances are, they're really lost. What's happened is, when copying certain files, iTunes has been told not to copy them to the iTunes Music folder, but rather to create a 'reference link' that links straight to the file in its' current location. If that file gets moved, or doesn't exist there anymore, iTunes gets confused.
For the music that's missing, chances are you're going to have to re-download it. Either that or Spotlight for the music files to see if they indeed are on the drive somewhere.

[dave310]

I lost all my music from my ipod (so I thought). When I looked at the info in settings it was taking up the space. It turns out the directory was corrupt. So I put it in disk mode and I ran Diskwarrior on it. It recovered all the files and DW put these normally invisible files/folders in a recovered folder on the Ipod. I then updated the Ipod software on the Ipod and it recreated the file structure on the Ipod the way its supposed to be. Itunes put the necessary files in an invisible folder called Ipod_Control which you can only see by doing a search on the Ipod from the finder and restricting it to invisible folders. I replaced all the F** folders in the new music folder with the F** in the recovered files folder which contain the actually music files and then replaced the Itunes.db in the new Itunes folder with the one from the recovered folder. My music and my playlists are back!!!! No guarantees but it worked for me.