how to find songs missing from itunes and finder

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rickytraynor

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Have 1200 albums collected over the last few years.

Have recently been going thro to add album art and noticed on some albums that there are songs missing from itunes and my disk.

Not sure how this has happened - as when i got them - always got the full album. Been a few changes over the years - laptop to desktop and then switched to mac recently - files have been deleted somehow!

Whatever the reason - i now need to go thro' all 1200 to see what's missing.

Is there anything which would do this - i'd guess it'd be easier to find a missing song if it happened to be say song 5 in a 12 song album.

If it was song 12 then unless the tags are set to show 'of 12' - most of mine aren't - then it becomes more difficult.

Any thoughts before I start at the top and work down!

Ricky
 

deeg

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hi ricky,

it sounds like you are in for a long job..

Without the accurate tag info regarding "track x of y" iTunes wont know how many tracks there should be if you just checked the count of tracks of an album. In the ripping options of iTunes there is one that prefixed the name with the track number in the created files. If you have used that there might be a method..

If i was doing this i would also make use of track comments and smart playlists to keep track of which albums i had done.

Create 1 playlist to contain the full library by a comment such as "not checked"
create another playlist to list which ones you have done by adding "full album" to the track comments as part of the check.
create another playlist to list the missing ones by adding "missing tracks" to comments...

you can make use of the Script "Search" command, checking for only albums against the "not checked" playlist. The search command is a string match so you may get more than one album's tracks returned if multiple albums contain the same string in their title so you would want to loop through the results of the Search to confirm they are by the same artist.

Once you have a single album's list of tracks you will need to
a) check for the presence of the 'x of y' data on any of them to get a required tracks value.
b) if no 'x of y' check the location of the tracks listed to see if there is a track number prefix and if so loop through the list to get the highest value (this wont be fool proof since you may have lost the last tracks)
c) make use of the web.. an Amazon query (see this http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10609 on how to query Amazon), or maybe directly to Gracenote ( have a look on Dougs site for a few scripts that do that)

Once you have the number of tracks there should be, its just a case of either appending "full album" or "missing tracks" ( or what ever your two results smart playlists were) to the comments depending on how many you do have.

If you like this approach and need help with specifics or need help with a different approach, post back...

deeg
 

WanderingSoul

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They need to make Itunes auto update the library like Windows Media Player. If its monitoring a folder, it should look for new music on start up. Gets annoying having to delete the library and re-add it because I've added a lot of music and don't want to sit there and add each addition one by one to the library.

Unless there is in fact a way to look for new and updated files?
 

deeg

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WanderingSoul said:
If its monitoring a folder....Unless there is in fact a way to look for new and updated files?
its not monitoring a folder and never has, the folder specified in the advanced prefs is just the location iTunes stores any additions to it via ripping or from the music store, change the location and it stores the tracks elsewhere but equally it does not, under normal operations, loose track of files it thinks are stored in the previous location.

You can do a file>add to library to add tracks, you can point it at a hard drive and it'll scan for them, v 4.9 is alot better at detecting and ignoring duplicates under such circumstances. One down side is if you have "add to music folder when adding" enabled any new tracks are then copied over to the location specified in the advanced prefs resulting in wasted disk space.
 

deeg

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if you mean when you move a file to the folder specified on the advanced prefs, does it show up in the itunes library file with you doing nothing else, the answer is no. As i mentioned, iTunes does not monitor that folder for new additions. However if you move the file to the folder and then take the file menu option 'Add to library' and then select the folder, iTunes will scan the folder for new tracks and add them to the library.
You need to do the "add to library" so its not an auto-update.

I have the 'copy to music folder when adding' option enabled on the advanced prefs so i dont need to move any files, all i do is do an 'add to library' against the new files selecting their current location. iTunes then copies the tracks over to the music folder for me as part as the addition. i then trash the originals.

To bring this back to scripts, since this is the forum topic, it is possible to automate the process to a certain degree via two options.

1. a droplet.. this is a script that fires when a file/folder is dropped onto the script icon. it would then do the addition for whats dropped onto the script.
2. a folder action.. you can associate a script with a folder so that when ever a file/folder is added to the watched folder, a script fires and does the addition.

Have a look at

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/
http://www.apple.com/applescript/guidebook/sbrt/pgs/sbrt.09.htm
http://www.apple.com/applescript/itunes/index.html
http://www.apple.com/applescript/folderactions/02.html

for more info...

Deeg
 

rickytraynor

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Hi Deeg

Thanks for your reply.
Think i'll take a look at the manual method first - see how long it takes.
Applescripting not my strongest point.

Ricky
 

xyst3r

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Hello, i have the same problem as was previously posted. I didnt want to resurect an old thread but the regular user has stopped me from posting my own thread for a week.

I was just wondering how i could fix this problem. I tried what was stated above.

I have 4,413 files in my itunes music folder and 4,217 in my itunes.

I dont think i want any of those missing files. But i wouldnt have a clue on where to start finding them. I have spent ages trying to work it out with no luck.

Help would be much appreciated

I would have posted this in the PC forum. I am running windows, not mac. . . even though this is in the mac thread. Sorry
P.S: if a mod wants to move this to the correct area. It would also be much appreciated. (i dont want to post 10 defunct replies to get the status. I will wait a week though if needed).
 
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adenng

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Missing Songs

I just downloaded the LyricsFetcher software onto my PC. After I run it getting all lyrics for the songs in my library, songs of the songs went missing.

the titles do appear in my iPhone 4 but when I click to play them, it just skipped to the next song. And also the software instead of giving the lyrics, it gave me junk text for all my songs.

Anyone out there knows how to get back my songs? They are still in my iTunes though but just not in my iPhone.

Very frustrating!
 
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