LOST SONGS OVERNIGHT

[cjmnews]

Yes it is. You will get a new copy when you install iTunes.

 

[patcolombi]

Ok great. I will keep you posted. By the way, where are you in time

 

[patcolombi]

After download this error message one or more users on this computer have installed iTunes from the Microsoft Store. Items may not run correctly after this installation . Do you want to continue?

 

[cjmnews]

I am in Arizona in the US (GMT-7) that should be under my name on each post.

You should uninstall iTunes from the Start menu as described in a previous post, right click it an uninstall.

Yes you should continue if you get the error message again.

 

[patcolombi]

Success! iTunes is installed. Funny thing though - there are no songs but there two playlists named GOOD & BAD - remnants of what I just uninstalled. How is that possible and is it ok? If it's ok then i'm ready to install my songs which are all on a thumb drive. Any pointers of how to to this?

 

[cjmnews]

No songs at all is not what I expected. I thought there would be 204 songs, like you said there was when you started this process.

No matter, any songs on this computer should still be there.
In iTunes you can click File->Add Folder to Library
A new window will appear, usually in the Music folder. Click on iTunes, then click the Select Folder button.

That should add any songs from the previous installation into the current iTunes.
Once this is complete, I would expect to have 204 songs in your library.

You really don't need the GOOD and BAD playlists now. The import will only have the songs that exist. You can delete the GOOD and BAD playlists by right clicking the playlist and choosing Delete from Library then click Delete on the following popup window.

You can also put the songs from the thumb drive into iTunes as well.
Open File Explorer and navigate to the thumb drive. Move this window to the left side of the screen, and resize so it only fills 1/2 of the screen.
Open iTunes, move this window to the right side of the screen, resize so it only fills 1/2 of the screen.
In File Explorer, click on the first song, then hold down the CTRL key, type A, release the CTRL key. This will select all the songs,
Drag the songs from File Explorer and drop onto the Library section of iTunes in the top left corner of the left column.
Wait a minute or five for the copy of the files to move from the thumb drive to iTunes, you can watch the progress in the top middle of iTunes.

Now the songs should be in iTunes and play.

Let me know if you have a bunch of Unknown Artist and Unknown Albums. We should be able to fix most of those by updating the Music in one of your other iTunes instances, deleting the Unknown stuff from this iTunes, copy the updated music to the thumb drive and importing them into this iTunes again.

 

[patcolombi]

I was so happy when that transaction showed more than 3889 songs that I expected. I found almost all of the extras in songs beginning with "a". It was probably because I did not see anything happening and I typed "a" again. So I delected the duplicates and #of songs was off by 1 which I will find eventually. I was ecstatic. Then I saw other visible differences. There was no column for "check marks" and there were no playlists.. So I started looking for the missing song. When I found it on the thumb drive I clicked on it and expected it to play. That is usually the way I add songs. When it didn't I went to iTunes and found it was not there either. Then I tried to play other songs. None of the songs can be played. The error message was "Song could not be used because the original file coulld not be found. Would you like to look for it"? I said Yes and it went into c://Windows>system32 but there was nothing about music there.. Also, after coming back to the iTunes screen many of the songs now have a circle with an i in it indicating an error. I just went back to iTunes to verify that message and all the little "i" symbols were gone but they come back as you try to play them. What do suppose went wrong? I really appreciate all your help. I've really learned a lot from you already.

 

[cjmnews]

Good to hear the music could be seen in your iTunes. Bad that lots of it has the exclamation point on it.

The ! (exclamation point) songs are songs that are in your library but not found where they were found before.
I have 2 reasons why:

1. These are personal songs that were located in your iCloud Music Library, and since Apple Music, you can't access it anymore.
2. These are Apple Music songs that were located on your hard drive, but removed when you cancelled Apple Music.

This is what the GOOD and BAD playlists were going to do. The GOOD was going to show you all the music you have on your computer.
The BAD was going to show you all the music that were hitting the above 2 scenarios.

Unfortunately the only way to get your personal music back is if you have a copy of it somewhere else before you signed up for Apple Music. One of the reasons why I will never sign up for Apple Music.

I am assuming your thumb drive only contains the personal music you owned from before Apple Music was added. If these are songs from Apple Music era, then they will never play and will be deleted from your system once iTunes detects them. No other player can play them either as they have Digital Rights Management (DRM) on them which prevents it.

You would need to drag the music from the thumb drive and drop it into iTunes as described in my previous post. It is unclear if this transaction happened or not from your response. If this has not happened, then drag the music from the thumb drive and drop it into iTunes see if several of the songs play, if most do not play, then creating the GOOD and BAD playlists should be done. If the drag and drop of music has happened, then you need to create the GOOD and Bad playlists to find any music you still actually own in the GOOD playlist and all the stuff you need to delete in the BAD playlist. Let me know how many songs are in each playlist.

I have a feeling the thumb drive is from the Apple Music era...which means most if not all of it cannot be used.

You did mention you had multiple computers running iTunes. If one of them had your personal music on it, but never used Apple Music, we can recover the songs and playlists from that copy. We can also recover from a pre-Apple Music backup of the iTunes folder of this computer.

Where did your personal music come from?
->Purchased from iTunes? These can be re-downloaded.
->CDs loaded? These can be re-loaded if you still have the CDs
->MP3 files from other services? Some may be still available from other services for re-download.
->How many from each?

When looking for Music files always navigate out of the C:\Windows\System32 directory to C: (for songs on any folder in your hard drive) or C:\Users\<login> (for songs stored within your login folder structure) or C:\Users\<login>\Music (for songs only in the Music folder)

 

[patcolombi]

UPDATE : This is the strangest issue I have every had with iTunes (or any program). Now , 4 hrs later, I have music that I can play . I obviously can't test them all but I randomly tried 5 or 6 and good music was played. I looked into "song info" and all info is there. So, now I have songs but no playlists. I hope you have a miracle in your pocket so I don't have to recreate those. UPDAT TO UPDATE: I went back to iTunes again to look for missing song and lo and behold THERE IS NO MUSIC. NO SONGS WILL PLAY AND THE CIRCLED ERROR ICONS ARE BACK. What next?

 

[cjmnews]

This sounds like all the music is from when you had Apple Music, and iTunes is deleting them as it is programmed to do, since you no longer subscribe to Apple Music.

You did mention you had multiple computers running iTunes. If one of them had your personal music on it, but never used Apple Music, we can recover the songs and playlists from that copy. We can also recover from a pre-Apple Music backup of the iTunes folder of this computer.

Where did your personal music come from?
->Purchased from iTunes? These can be re-downloaded.
->CDs loaded? These can be re-loaded if you still have the CDs
->MP3 files from other services? Some may be still available from other services for re-download.
->How many from each?

 

[patcolombi]

This is a long answer because you brought up so many question so bear with me please. I have tried to put together the information you asked about.My music collection with iTunes started in 2008 with my 45’s. I copied my 45’s to tape then to disc and then to iTunes. After that I purchased about 204 from Tunes and in January of 2017 I began downloading 5 songs a week from public library which total about 750. Approx. 2900 came from my cd’s. I am 83 years old years and I couldn’t even begin to think about going through that, especially since I have all the songs on two other computers and three iPods. Music has never been played from the other two computers and very rarely from this one. Every Monday I download the songs from the library, copy them to 3 computers and 3 iPods. Music is played from the iPods only my car .
However, this is the computer I use daily. It is a large laptop that fits on a table on my lap. So I would like to get it back here for convenience. One of the others is a small laptop that I use when I travel to Arizona every year to visit my sister. The last one is a desktop one tied to a hard drive and is stationary.

The Apple Music fiasco was in early March. I downloaded a bunch of songs to this computer maybe one or two days until I realized what was happening but I don’t remember if the music got copied to the other computers or are they automatically loaded to iTunes on all computers. If they do, then they were on all three.
The thumb drive contains music from both before and after Apple Music.

What time period do you mean when you mention Apple Music Era? The songs that started as 45’s come from the 50’s era when I was in high school. I don’t know if you remember there were no previous iTunes files on this computer when we looked for them. All three computers have my personal music and it is also on the thumb drive.
thanks again for all your efforts trying to help me with this issue.

 

[patcolombi]

I just went back to iTunes, clicked on song info of several songs and I saw what you meant when I looked in file , the location for all of them is D:\ with a number. So I don't understand how it was that when first copied from the thumb drive to iTunes they played and now they won't play because itunes was programmed to do something each time a change occurred after that. Are you implying that iTunes is still somehow tracking every time I try to do anything in itunes and if so will that affect the other computers . I hope I'm not confusing you with all these questions. I'm just trying to understand what is going on.

 

[cjmnews]

Apple Music Era (fiasco in your words) was a bit of a joke, that would be from Feb 2020 - May 2020 for you, the time when you had the Apple Music account active.

The music origin was just me trying to find a way to recover the music through other methods. Based on math using your numbers above, you should have 3800+ tracks that are yours. It is not feasible to try and get the 750 again, you would be almost 86 when that was done. The CDs could be done, they would just take some time, and that is the bulk of the music.

I am surprised to see that you have 3 copies of iTunes running and 3 iPods. Most people can barely handle 1 copy of iTunes and try not to use it. I would guess you provide technical support to your neighbors and friends too. Good to be one of the knowledgeable ones.

Song file location is in D:
This would be the cause of the exclamation points, as you are probably testing after removing the thumb drive, which is the right way to test.
You are not impacting the other computers at all.
Let's check your settings on Import of new music.

In iTunes, click on Edit->Preferences, then click on the Advanced tab.​

In the top half there is a big box for your iTunes Media folder location, under that are 3 check boxes. You need to make sure the first 2 are checked.​

Keep iTunes Media folder organized will move media files into <Artist>/<Album>/[<Disc number>\]<track number> <song name>.<extension> in the media folder.​

Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library will make sure when you drag and drop files from the thumb drive, they get copied to the computer hard drive so you don't get the exclamation points after you remove the thumb drive. This I think is not checked for you, causing the thumb drive copies to not work properly.​

Click OK to save the setting changes.​

​

Question about your other iTunes installations:
Do these other copies of iTunes play your personal songs and have your playlists?

If the answer is YES

Put the thumb drive into one of the other computers (not main laptop)​

Using File Explorer, navigate to C:\Users\<login>\Music​

Right click the iTunes folder and chose Copy​

Using File Explorer, navigate to the thumb drive (make sure you see the songs in File Explorer)​

Click on the Paste button (Windows 10) or Click on Edit->Paste (Windows 7) or hold the CTRL key, type V, release the CTRL key to copy the folder to the thumb drive. Wait for the copy to complete.​

Go to your main laptop​

Close iTunes​

Using File Explorer, navigate to C:\Users\<login>\Music​

Right click the iTunes folder and chose Delete to send it to the Recycle Bin.​

Using File Explorer, navigate to the thumb drive​

Right click the iTunes folder and chose Copy​

Using File Explorer, navigate to C:\Users\<login>\Music​

Click the Paste button, wait for it to finish.​

Open iTunes​

Playlists and Music should be there, everything should play.​

​

If the answer is NO:
The songs can be recovered but playlists will have to be created by hand.

Clean up previous imports:
Let's create 2 playlists in iTunes:
Create a normal playlist, click on File->New->Playlist, name it GOOD
Select all the Music in your Music section (Click on any track then type CTRL-A), drag the selection and drop on the GOOD Playlist.
Create a smart playlist, click on File->New->Smart Playlist. Set the criteria to Playlist is NOT GOOD. And click OK. Name this playlist BAD.
BAD will be the list of all songs that iTunes can't find.

Click on the BAD playlist, click on the first song, hold the CTRL key, type A, release the CTRL key to select all the songs in the BAD playlist. Right click one of the songs and choose Delete From Library to remove all the songs that were not copied correctly.

Add music from thumb drive:
Open File Explorer and navigate to the thumb drive. Move this window to the left side of the screen, and resize so it only fills 1/2 of the screen.
Open iTunes, move this window to the right side of the screen, resize so it only fills 1/2 of the screen.
In File Explorer, click on the first song, then hold down the CTRL key, type A, release the CTRL key. This will select all the songs,
Drag the songs from File Explorer and drop onto the Library section of iTunes in the top left corner of the left column.
Wait a minute or five for the copy of the files to move from the thumb drive to iTunes, you can watch the progress in the top middle of iTunes.

Now the songs should be in iTunes and play.

 

[patcolombi]

Hi again. Last night before i quit for the night I was scrolling through iTunes and I happened to come across a duplicate song. It was one that I ha tried ti play earlier so I was going to delete it. Then I thought let my check song info to compare locations.. Well the 1st one had just a D\\ and a number. I checked the other one and found this:
C:\\Users\ottiliegirl\Downloads\DOWNLOADEDMUSIC\ScotJoplin_TheEntainer_843436053277_1_2.mp3.

I have two files where I save the actual downloaded music once all the computers have been upgraded. The second file is named Downloaded Music 2016.-2018 where I dump songs when the first file gets too full. Now what I did next I'm not sure of. I did something with that path and the next thing I knew I had 3868 songs in iTunes.
Since these files contained only downloaded song I assumed it could not possible contain all the discs that I did manually Next I made those GOOD and BAD playlists. I spent most of today clicking on each song and when I heard music I moved on to the next one and they all went into the GOOD playlist. The BAD playlist is empty. I didn't listen to every one. If it was a 12 song CD I simply checked the first, a middle and last. But I still have no playlists. I don't want to do anything with that thumb drive right now. I have a new 32gb coming on Sunday and then I'll get back to it. When I do it following yours, what will make it come with the playlists? What would happen if I copied the playlists to a thumb drive and paste it into what I've got? Is that possible while I wait for my new drive. More next week. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe.

 

[cjmnews]

There is no rush at all. I can wait for the drive or if you want to take a break for a week or two.

If you can copy the iTunes folder from one of your other computers then you will get the playlists from that computer too.

I am hoping your other computer has all the songs and playlists that you want.

You can’t just copy a playlist, you can export a playlist as XML and import it to the main computer. I could document that process if you want.

If you were to create the GOOD and BAD playlists per the instructions instead of manually adding songs to the GOOD playlist, we could eliminate the bad songs from the thumb drive copy that didn’t seem to work.

You should fix the preferences as I documented above to help with new music additions in the future.

 

[patcolombi]

I just read and printed out your most recent instructions. My new drive came todya so I'm ready to start again.
the answer is YES. Both other computers play and have every playlist. If I'm not mistaken the instructions you are recomending ae the same steps I took originally. Those led to about 3000 songs back in iTunes, with no playlists and all sporting an exclamation mark when accessed. Then I check the location address on one of the tunes and used it somehow to get all 3900 songs that I spent all day listening to and placing all in the GOOD playlist. This is about the 3rd time that I could hear them once and the next time they had those exclamation icons, which they have now. Not one song will play. So I am going to try again following your suggestions I don't know how this continues to happen.

 

[patcolombi]

Another clue - I don't know how it can help but maybe somehow. I went back to try to delete everything and start again But I wanted to check again where it indicated the file I used was coming from. The song I chose yesterday with the long address now started with File://localhost/D:/02 The Entertainer. The "D" represents the Drive letter of the USB. I put the Usb back in and music, music music. Song after song! Does this mean anything to you? I hope you're not getting discouraged or annoyed by this. I've never had anyone give so much attention like this.

 

[cjmnews]

If I'm not mistaken the instructions you are recomending ae the same steps I took originally. Those led to about 3000 songs back in iTunes, with no playlists and all sporting an exclamation mark when accessed.

You are mistaken. There is a big difference in the second set of steps, making this a more complete copy that would provide more information.

Old way:
Music only was copied to USB followed by Drag and Drop onto iTunes.
This failed in 2 ways.

1. Incorrect settings in iTunes made all the files appear as if they were on the thumb drive not in iTunes.
2. The songs were the only thing copied so the playlists were missing.

New Way:
Copy the entire iTunes library from a working iTunes, delete the bad data from the main computer, replace the iTunes folder on the main computer with the Library and Music all with File explorer.
This should work for 3 reasons:
The library file is included with the copy, thus bringing the playlists.
The music is also located in the iTunes folder so all the locations in the iTunes Library will be correct.
This is the standard process used to migrate iTunes from one computer to another, I have done this at least 7 times with my personal systems.

I spent all day listening to and placing all in the GOOD playlist

There was no need to perform this task manually by listening to every track. The steps provided use the iTunes built in rules to enable this task to be completed without spending more than 10 minutes at the task.

The song I chose yesterday with the long address now started with File://localhost/D:/02 The Entertainer. The "D" represents the Drive letter of the USB. I put the Usb back in and music, music music. Song after song!

Yes the incorrect setting in iTunes that I had you fix above is the cause of this. Apple must have changed the default since I last installed a fresh copy.

I hope you're not getting discouraged or annoyed by this.

I am trying to help without being present, or being able to access your computer. You are performing some difficult tasks, that I think I am not explaining well. I hope this single post can resolve everything as I have broken it down into steps. If you don't understand something ask about it before trying it. I will try to restate it to be more clear. We all need help sometimes and this is how I can help.

1. Fix the iTunes Settings:

In iTunes, click on Edit->Preferences, then click on the Advanced tab.​

In the top half there is a big box for your iTunes Media folder location, under that are 3 check boxes. You need to make sure the first 2 are checked.​

Keep iTunes Media folder organized will move media files into <Artist>/<Album>/[<Disc number>\]<track number> <song name>.<extension> in the media folder.​

Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library will make sure when you drag and drop files from the thumb drive, they get copied to the computer hard drive so you don't get the exclamation points after you remove the thumb drive. This I think is not checked for you, causing the thumb drive copies to not work properly.​

Click OK to save the setting changes.​

2. Backup your iTunes from a working computer (not main laptop) and restore onto main laptop:

Backup:​

Put the new thumb drive into one of the other computers (not main laptop)​

Using File Explorer, navigate to C:\Users\<login>\Music​

Right click the iTunes folder and chose Copy​

Using File Explorer, navigate to the thumb drive (make sure you see the songs in File Explorer)​

Click on the Paste button (Windows 10) or Click on Edit->Paste (Windows 7) or hold the CTRL key, type V, release the CTRL key to copy the folder to the thumb drive. Wait for the copy to complete.​

Remove thumb drive from this system.​

​

Clean up prior mistakes:​

Go to your main laptop​

Close iTunes​

Using File Explorer, navigate to C:\Users\<login>\Music​

Right click the iTunes folder and chose Delete to send it to the Recycle Bin.​

Restore:​

Put the new thumb drive into the mail laptop​

Using File Explorer, navigate to the thumb drive​

Right click the iTunes folder and chose Copy​

Using File Explorer, navigate to C:\Users\<login>\Music​

Click the Paste button, wait for it to finish.​

​

Test:​

Open iTunes​

Playlists and Music should be there, everything should play.​

 

[patcolombi]

Following your latest instructions, I now have 11,043 items being copied from Music to USB Drive (E). Does this sound right since I have only 3900 songs? It is only 3% completed so it will take a long time to complete.

 

[cjmnews]

Following your latest instructions, I now have 11,043 items being copied from Music to USB Drive (E). Does this sound right since I have only 3900 songs? It is only 3% completed so it will take a long time to complete.

It sounds a little high I was expecting around 8000, as there are other files like album artwork that are in there, no worries.