My purchased music in iTunes is disappearing

When you notice that a song has disappeared from your library, does the entry for the song still appear, but with an exclamation mark to the left of the title? Make sure that you look for it under the artist and as well as the song title.

If so, that suggests that the original file for the song is no longer where it was when you added it to your iTunes Library.

Two things to do:

1. 1. work out which type of songs are disappearing. Is it only the songs originally from CD, or is it only the purchased songs, or both?
   2. is it individual songs from an album; i.e. are the other songs on the album still listed in your library? If so, the first thing to check is whether the song is in the folder with the rest of the songs on the album. (Although in theory that's where the file should have been placed, there are times when the file is put in another location, but at this time, look first of all in the same folder as the rest of the album.)

dwood9764 wrote:

Should I start backing up my itunes library?

You should already be making a backup and keeping it up to date, so yes, start now.

The recommended advice is to keep a backup on a separate drive, preferably one external to your computer. That way, if your computer is rendered unusable, you have all your music in a backup that can be used with a new computer.

Personally, I am not aware of any scenario whereby songs completely disappear from iTunes without someone actually deleting the entry. (If it can happen, I suspect that tt2 will let us know.)

But what can definitely happen is when a file for a song is edited outside of iTunes, it can cause iTunes to lose track of the location for that file. In this event, the entry for the song remains in your iTunes Library, but with an exclamation mark next to the song title. The exclamation mark may only appear after either:

• • asking iTunes to play the song
  • iTunes attempts to add the song to a portable device during a synchronisation process

To move forward:

• identify a song that's now missing
• check to see whether the entry for it still exists in your library:
  • if it doesn't, use Windows Explorer and look in the folders for a folder with the artist's name. If you find it, look in that folder for a sub-folder with the album title and in that should be the tracks for that album:
    • if the tracks are there, but the entry for them in iTunes is missing, you can re-establish the link in your Library by using iTunes' menu command File/Add Folder to Library, navigate to that folder and select it
    • if the tracks and folder are missing, it suggests that the folder has been deleted, probably manually

To try and stop this happening in the future you may need to identify how it happened originally.

As for backing up;

dwood9764 wrote:

... I always assumed that putting every song I had into itunes was a secure place.

No, it definitely isn't.

Consider this; songs listed in your iTunes Library are not "in iTunes". Instead, the file for each song is stored on your computer's hard drive (or SSD). Drives and computers can and do fail, so it's in your own interest to keep and maintain a backup of your music - and here are two reasons why:

1. 1. CDs can become unreadable. I've found two in my collection that are suffering from disc rot. Yes, the disc goes rotten, the silver surface containing the information breaks up. That's it, the disc fails. I've also suffered from disc bronzing, whereby the outer edge of the CD goes a bronze colour and this causes chirping noises on the later tracks on the disc. So that dis still plays, but with horrible noises interrupting the music
   2. Although purchases from the iTunes Store (and other online retailers) can be re-downloaded by going to your account with that store, the peculiar licensing agreements for a piece of music mean that sometimes that piece can be removed from the store in your country

Remember also, that unless you subscribe to Apple's Match service (which I don't), any music from your CDs is not available to you from the iTunes Store, even as a backup.

I've had this issue too, but for my own music files. For me, it just does whole entire albums, that I am CERTAIN I had.

As proof of this, I have them on my iPhone 11, which required them to be in my iTunes library to begin with to make the transfer.

What's more, whenever I plug my iPhone in to then to copy the albums back from my iPhone (since they're still there), they just magically... don't show up when I am rooting around my iPhone's music library, using the Windows iTunes app, as does about 50% of the music files on my phone. This is unacceptable.

I have further banned iTunes from editing my Windows explorer file library, but it ignores these "preferences" that I set. Further still, it deletes the mp3 files from my Windows file library. Occasionally I catch them in my recycle bin in time, but not usually.

My workaround for this has been to copy all of my music files onto my D-drive, and then have iTunes playing the other files from my C-drive.

If anyone ever figures out a way to stop this from happening, I'm all ears.

See my earlier post to the thread. If you backup your library with SyncToy or similar you can review the suggested updates whenever you refresh your backup. It will be apparent if any tracks have disappeared and instead of mirroring those deletions you can copy the files manually back to the folders they've been removed from.

FWIW the only time it has happened to me was when iTunes "synced" my podcast preferences (unasked) and removed all my locally stored podcasts. Needless to say I was livid, but at least I was able to undo the damage.

tt2

See Backup your iTunes for Windows library with SyncToy - Apple Community for a suggested backup strategy.

tt2