Missing songs

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Slacky1957

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I have a difference of 4 songs of about 16000 between my iTunes and iPod.

If I give all the songs on iPod a star rating I should be able to compare the 2 lists by syncing and finding the 4 songs without a star.

Good in theory except that whenever I select all of the iPod list and try to add a rating I get the "not responding" message and have go go into task manager to close iTunes down

Any ideas?
 

rockmyplimsoul

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First, it looks like you're posting in the wrong section of the forum (what type of iPod is this, a Classic?) I'll move it once I know what you're working with.

Second, which has more songs, your iTunes library or your iPod?

Third, are you manually managing music and video on the iPod? Or are you auto-syncing?

- If you're manually managing, star ratings don't transfer between iPod and iTunes in either direction. Also, if you're manually managing is it possible you "borrowed" some songs from a different library? Another possibility is an old problem (not sure if it still exists) where if you change the tag of a song and re-drag it to your iPod, you'll get a 2nd copy on the iPod.

- If you auto-sync, you can only set the ratings in your library and sync those across to your iPod (i.e. you cannot set the star ratings on the iPod from within iTunes). Also, if you're auto-syncing, the difference could be that iTunes can't find the native file on your hard drive for these 4 songs, or the 4 songs are corrupted and won't transfer.
 

Slacky1957

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Apologise for using the wrong section, I had a frustrating long evening trying to resolve this.

I am auto-syncing.

I spent about 2 months re-doing my i tunes as I accidentally deleted both my back up files and the ipod within days.

I had other mp3 copies but I had to drag them back into my iTunes file store and re-locate many of them.

I was left with about 130 which I had missed and I found most of them by copying the full list into a play list and giving the ones in the play lit a star rating which also gave the ones in itunes the rating except the 130 without a correct path location. I was therefore able to find where they were.

Problem is the missing 4 copied ok into the play-list but not on to the iPod. I thought could use a similar technique to locate the 4 but it didn't work.

Any ideas other than going through artist by artist or genre by genre to find them?
 

rockmyplimsoul

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Easy? No not really.

If you're autosyncing and your iPod has 4 fewer songs than in your library, then they're either missing a link to their native file or they are corrupt and won't transfer.

It sounds like you've ruled out songs with a missing link (clever idea to find them!) so it sounds like corrupt files, which are difficult to locate.

About all I can recommend is using resources outside of iTunes to help find the difference between your library contents and your iPod contents. For example, if you have MS Excel and know how to compare two lists to see what's different, then you could find the missing songs. How do you do that?

Select all songs in your library, copy, and paste directly into Excel. You can do the same with the contents of your iPod, but you first have to change it to "Manually manage music and video" in order to copy and paste in this manner (change back to auto-sync when done).

Once you have the two lists in Excel, perform the comparison to find the 4 missing items. I've done this before, but by importing the Excel spreadsheet into MS Access (which is much easier to do comparisons). Excel can do comparisons, I just don't know how. If nothing else, you can copy and paste the two lists into Excel side-by-side, and if sorted the same you can run down the list until you see a difference.

There are likely other ways to do such a comparison, maybe a 3rd party solution or different ways to extract the data, but this is what I've done.
 

Slacky1957

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It is now getting stranger.

I decided to narrow it down by creating a smart playlist for each year from 1962 to 2013.

iPod and iTunes totals match exactly on each year.

They add up to 16033, the total on iTunes

Still only 16029 on the iPod total songs though

Does this mean playlists include songs that can't be played?
 

Slacky1957

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Thanks for the tip about Excel. Would never have known that you had to change to manual to copy.
 

Slacky1957

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Brilliant. Now sorted. It was duplicates, and in some cases that meant a track missing as I must have clicked wrong location for mp3 files
 
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