More tunes in Library than on iPod even though it says it is synched

[Emoto]

iPod Synch Issue
120 GB ipod classic Almost 20 GB free space.

iTunes library with 14112 songs. Set to automatically synch. All songs have a checkmark. iTunes 9.0.0.7.0

Issue: Main iPod music screen says 11957 songs.

Thoughts?

Tried to post this a minute ago and something went wrong...

[Sparkee]

A couple things come to mind but I'm not sure if it would add up to a few thousand files. With a library that size you probably have a few duplicate files and a few files not properly formatted for the iPod.

[Emoto]

Originally Posted by Sparkee

A couple things come to mind but I'm not sure if it would add up to a few thousand files. With a library that size you probably have a few duplicate files and a few files not properly formatted for the iPod.

Thanks for the kind response. Each song has been painstakingly ripped from a CD using iTunes, by me, each with a distinct album name. After ripping the CDs they go on a shelf to gather dust, as I never use them after that, other than as archival storage. So, it seems unlikely that I might manage to rip the same CDs over again, much less 3000 songs worth. So, I am fairly confident that there are very few dupes.

I have also never experienced a HD failure or had to restore anything, so things wouldn't have gone missing that way, either.

[Emoto]

Ok, this is really weird. NOW the numbers agree!!! I must have synched the darn thing 10 times today as I tried to see what was going on, and each time the result was the same, with a ~3k diff. Now, literally as I was composing my last reply to you, it finished the most recent synch and now has all 14112 songs listed on the iPod.

I must confess I am baffled.

[Emoto]

Weirder still. Today, I synched up again (I had added maybe 30 songs) and now I am back to having a 3k difference in number of songs between the iPod and iTunes.

[Emoto]

Today, after 3 re-synchs were run, the 3000 song difference remained. I re-booted the iPod, then synched, and now the number of songs agrees with iTunes. Who knows what tomorrow may bring????

[Code Monkey]

While I know that waiting on a full size iPod to finish syncing everything might be painful, have you tried restoring the iPod and testing to see if the odd behavior still continues?

Most unexplainable behavior is eliminated via restoring (and I haven't met the iPod yet that didn't need restoring periodically so if it's been several months, you'll probably be doing yourself a favor even if it doesn't fix your song count discrepancy problem).

[Emoto]

Originally Posted by Code Monkey

While I know that waiting on a full size iPod to finish syncing everything might be painful, have you tried restoring the iPod and testing to see if the odd behavior still continues?

Most unexplainable behavior is eliminated via restoring (and I haven't met the iPod yet that didn't need restoring periodically so if it's been several months, you'll probably be doing yourself a favor even if it doesn't fix your song count discrepancy problem).

Thanks for the thought, Code Monkey. No, I have not tried restoring it. That will be what I do if this happens again. I try to go for the least invasive action possible to remedy the problem, but that does appear to be the next skull on the necklace, so to speak...

Clearly you have a lot more iPod experience than I. You say you've seen a need for a restore on other iPods before?

[Code Monkey]

Originally Posted by Emoto

Clearly you have a lot more iPod experience than I. You say you've seen a need for a restore on other iPods before?

Yep, all of them. Every single iPod has an "expiration date" before you'll find some glitch that you need to restore to get rid of.

For example, I had to restore my 4G nano about 3 days ago after it had performed well for about 10 months. Podcasts and videos started doing weird hiccups when you started them, often just stopping a few times before it would finally play. Restored, reloaded, and now it's back to good performance. The upside was I gained a few hundred megabytes in capacity that was probably from orphaned files that were supposed to be removed but never were.

Once there are errors in the iPod database, they're there for the duration (until you restore). Once those errors start causing performance problems, you restore. This is not uncommon, hence the whole 3Rs of iPod problems (reset, restore, repair), most problems get fixed by the reset, most remaining problems get fixed by the restore, and everything else means you've got real problems. This is also why you see me and the other veterans strongly cautioning against the idiotic practice of wanting to only keep stuff on the iPod because that $20 worth of hard drive space is too much to waste on the computer (when, if you're smart, it's not just on the computer and the iPod, it's in at least one other location as well). If the problem that creeps up prevents you from copying stuff off your iPod first, well, hope you like re-ripping or otherwise re-acquiring your music again .

[Emoto]

Originally Posted by Code Monkey

Yep, all of them. Every single iPod has an "expiration date" before you'll find some glitch that you need to restore to get rid of.

For example, I had to restore my 4G nano about 3 days ago after it had performed well for about 10 months. Podcasts and videos started doing weird hiccups when you started them, often just stopping a few times before it would finally play. Restored, reloaded, and now it's back to good performance. The upside was I gained a few hundred megabytes in capacity that was probably from orphaned files that were supposed to be removed but never were.

Once there are errors in the iPod database, they're there for the duration (until you restore). Once those errors start causing performance problems, you restore. This is not uncommon, hence the whole 3Rs of iPod problems (reset, restore, repair), most problems get fixed by the reset, most remaining problems get fixed by the restore, and everything else means you've got real problems. This is also why you see me and the other veterans strongly cautioning against the idiotic practice of wanting to only keep stuff on the iPod because that $20 worth of hard drive space is too much to waste on the computer (when, if you're smart, it's not just on the computer and the iPod, it's in at least one other location as well). If the problem that creeps up prevents you from copying stuff off your iPod first, well, hope you like re-ripping or otherwise re-acquiring your music again .

Very interesting, indeed! Thanks for such helpful perspective. Had this been one of my other drives, instead of an iPod, I probably would have deleted everything sooner, but I hate to miss a trick due to lack of product knowledge.

As an aside, I keep my iTunes library on a hard drive, and have a backup on another drive, not that you were suggesting anything about how I keep my stuff.