I recently noticed that iTunes 7 had deleted several songs and podcasts out of my music library. The song still appears listed, but with an “!” next to it, and the actual file is gone. Others on the web have witnessed similar problems with iTunes 7, often times with far worse consequences. My set up is not exotic; all the the files are on a local hard drive that has plenty of space left. (And don’t think I could have accidently deleted them myself.) Of the 4 songs I know I was missing, I found two in my Mozy backups, by looking at the metadata in iTunes about when it was modified and then going back to a backup point when it existed. But two songs (the New Pornographers’ “Spirit of Giving” and The Knife’s “The Captain”, for the record) never appear in any backup, and I didn’t go looking for the missing podcasts. It seems the songs were deleted before they made it into the nightly backup. I filed a bug report with Apple, and haven’t received any response to a posting in their support forum. All the songs were purchased through the iTunes store which doesn’t permit redownloading purchased songs (except supposedly once if you contact support). Let this be my lesson about sometimes chosing convenience over DRM-free.
a lesser known character
January 27th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
I think I know what may have happened. Your “Suck” settings have not been calibrated. With iTunes 7.4, Apple quietly added a feature that erased songs that weren’t any good. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, “We know, more than you, what you want to listen to, and we’re going to sell it to you, too.”
It seems that you just need to tweak the settings in iTunes -> File -> Preferences -> Suck Feature and you shouldn’t notice anymore songs disappearing. At least not songs you should want to listen to.
January 27th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I should have suspected something when copies of that Feist “1234” song magically replaced them!