Lost damn near all my songs in iTunes

[Unit74]

Now Im effing ****ed!

I have a ton of music that was loaded from CDs. Its a tangible asset instead of a digital ownership like iTunes

So I hooked up my iPad to rip it all to my new computer and before could Itunes decided my CD loaded tunes were not worthy. WTF is apple thinking? They are got their asses handed to them for this **** in the past.

Im really ****ing ****ed right now. This is basically theft if you ask me.

It was about 10 gigs of music they dumped all because it was not purchased via iTunes.

On my iPad, the songs are still showing, but they are all greyed out. I thought I could get iExplorer in there and no dice....They are greyed out in there too! **** Apple you ****ing *******s!

 

[pigpenracing]

LOL!
Welcome to the iWorld

 

[Cpt_Kirk]

*Crapple

 

[Let'sgoflying!]

BTDT, didn't find a solution. Still mad as you!
It amounts to a crime; theft....or destruction of property.
Now I see iTunes as a tool with which I move my (protected, backed-up) music from laptop to idevice.

 

[Austin_Marshall]

I’m not really sure why the iTunes playlists disappear during some transfers and updates, but as far as I know there is 2 possibility there in this case. Either it may possible that you playlist is just hidden so for enabling that you just need to scroll your mouse over PLAYLISTS on the left sidebar. Show or Hide will come up to the left of the word PLAYLISTS. Click on Show or Hide and your PLAYLISTS will Show or Hide. This is done in my case. Or else I have found one other possiblity while doing just a quick google so for that you need to follow some steps as below:

• Quit iTunes
• Open the iTunes Music folder, on a Mac this is by default in ~/Music/ and in Windows it’s in \My Documents\My Music\iTunes\ or \Username\My Music\
• Drag the file labeled “iTunes Music Library.xml” to your desktop
• Drag the “iTunes Library” file to the desktop as well (make sure this is no longer in your iTunes folder at all)
• Now relaunch iTunes
• Before doing anything else, go to File -> Library -> Import Playlist
• Now navigate to your desktop to the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file that you placed there earlier and select it
• iTunes will recreate your playlists, and any iOS devices you have synced with iTunes will resync their playlists as well

Again, this I have never tried, but you can try if it will work just let me know.

 

[Catalo]

Now Im effing ****ed!

I have a ton of music that was loaded from CDs. Its a tangible asset instead of a digital ownership like iTunes

So I hooked up my iPad to rip it all to my new computer and before could Itunes decided my CD loaded tunes were not worthy. WTF is apple thinking? They are got their asses handed to them for this **** in the past.

Im really ****ing ****ed right now. This is basically theft if you ask me.

It was about 10 gigs of music they dumped all because it was not purchased via iTunes.

On my iPad, the songs are still showing, but they are all greyed out. I thought I could get iExplorer in there and no dice....They are greyed out in there too! **** Apple you ****ing *******s!

If you select show hidden files and go into the ipod folder in explorer you can get all the music off. You have to rename it but it's not completely gone

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk

 

[Anymouse]

Interesting. I have a bunch of CDs ripped as well. Never had a problem.

 

[JoeSelch]

This is what happens when you turn over control of your stuff

 

[FastEddieB]

This is what happens when you turn over control of your stuff...

...AND do not have an efficient backup protocol.

Otherwise, all your music eggs are literally in one basket.

My iTunes library is backed up to Time Machine, and a weekly backup.

Though admittedly iTunes can be far less than transparent in the way it handles files. And that's putting it nicely.

 

[Sac Arrow]

I’m not really sure why the iTunes playlists disappear during some transfers and updates, but as far as I know there is 2 possibility there in this case. Either it may possible that you playlist is just hidden so for enabling that you just need to scroll your mouse over PLAYLISTS on the left sidebar. Show or Hide will come up to the left of the word PLAYLISTS. Click on Show or Hide and your PLAYLISTS will Show or Hide. This is done in my case. Or else I have found one other possiblity while doing just a quick google so for that you need to follow some steps as below:

• Quit iTunes
• Open the iTunes Music folder, on a Mac this is by default in ~/Music/ and in Windows it’s in \My Documents\My Music\iTunes\ or \Username\My Music\
• Drag the file labeled “iTunes Music Library.xml” to your desktop
• Drag the “iTunes Library” file to the desktop as well (make sure this is no longer in your iTunes folder at all)
• Now relaunch iTunes
• Before doing anything else, go to File -> Library -> Import Playlist
• Now navigate to your desktop to the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file that you placed there earlier and select it
• iTunes will recreate your playlists, and any iOS devices you have synced with iTunes will resync their playlists as well

Again, this I have never tried, but you can try if it will work just let me know.

Something along these lines. Itunes will convert ripped CD's in to AAC format but it doesn't destroy the original MP3's. You just have to find them and re-import them. The real issue is if your MP3 set somehow departs your storage media through computer migrations, or through backup to another computer. This happened to me too, all my ripped CD material was lost in a restore even though the two Itunes songs I purchased remained. Fortunately I did have a backup of the original songs and was able to bring them back in easy enough.

 

[JGoodish]

I'm not sure what the complaint is here. If you're trying to import your music from your iPad to your new computer, that probably isn't going to work. My understanding is that iTunes is one-way for music content, so the music has to exist in iTunes first. In that case, transfer the ripped files from your old PC to your new one in the iTunes directory. If you deleted the original files from your PC, there's no other way to say it: not smart. The content in iTunes is a backup to what is on the iPad, should the iPad get lost, stolen, replaced, or need to be wiped for any reason. Also, ensure that you are authenticated with your AppleID in iTunes on the new computer (i.e. the new computer is authorized for music content with your AppleID.)

And, as others have stated, you really should consider creating a periodic backup of your PC for all data files if you don't have one already. This is common advice, but I do understand that it's more difficult to do in practice.


JKG

 

[BigBadLou]

*Crapple

HEY!!!! That's MY invention! No stealing!
And you spelled it wrong, it is "crApple".

Sorry for your loss, Unit, but to be blunt, it serves you right for using crApple products. You are a pilot, you should know better and stay away from useless junk. (hey, I can say it, I too own a useless gaiPad)

I asked a crApple friend some time ago: "how do I put music on my gaiPad?" and after clarifying that I do not wish to pay again for purchasing the CDs I already own via some ai-Choons, he said: "I think it can be done, I think there might be a way and it should not be overly complicated". Wrong answer, if you ask me. But hey, it's crApple, it is "not overly complicated".

 

[FastEddieB]

I asked a crApple friend some time ago: "how do I put music on my gaiPad?" and after clarifying that I do not wish to pay again for purchasing the CDs I already own via some ai-Choons, he said: "I think it can be done, I think there might be a way and it should not be overly complicated". Wrong answer, if you ask me. But hey, it's crApple, it is "not overly complicated".

Does not compute.

Open iTunes on your computer.

Slip the CD into an attached drive.

iTunes will ask if you want to import all the tracks.

Say yes.

If online, it will reach out and attach proper track names, lengths, etc. and import them.

You now have those tracks in iTunes. Simple to move them to any mounted iDevice.

Sorry, it's hard to imagine making it a whole lot easier.

In addition, if you susbcribe to iTunes Match, all of your music is available streaming from the cloud on any iDevice. Works well for me.

 

[Hank S]

That sounds very doable, Eddie.

But if NOT USING AN APPLE PRODUCT, you just plug it into the computer, load the CD and drag the songs into the device. WITH APPLE, everything going in must go through, and be approved by, Apple. And if something gets screwed up, you lose.

But it's OK. We should al start getting used to Big Brother watching everything we do. That, and paying subscriptions to use things we have already bought.

 

[FastEddieB]

But it's OK. We should al start getting used to Big Brother watching everything we do. That, and paying subscriptions to use things we have already bought.

To be fair, no subscription fee to access every track you've ever ripped from a CD or downloaded via Napster or Limewire or whatever or bought from the iTunes store. Or to move them to any device.

The iTunes Match subscription buys you the cloud service. Incidentally, it also provides better digital copies of songs you may have downloaded in very low quality format.

It's handy if I'm driving down the road and suddenly want to hear some obscure album I ripped years ago. Every song I own, legal or illegal, shows up on my iPhone and will start streaming from the cloud in a matter of seconds.

Others may offer that sort of thing for free (I think its about $25/yr for the Apple service), or for less, and that's fine. Like I said, works for me.

Or, we can just bash Apple all day - that would be fun!

 

[Scrabo]

>> ...AND do not have an efficient backup protocol.

+1 - all my music, photos, docs etc. are copied automatically to a NAS drive every 24 hrs. When I lost a hard drive a few months ago, everything was back within 2 hrs of hard drive replacement - worst case I may have lost one or two files.

BTW : that NAS drive is backed up to alternative portable hard drives every 2 weeks, I always keep the latest copy in my work as an off-site backup just in case.

 

[MadseasoN]

I just went through a big ordeal with iTunes. If you have iTunes configured to 'Organize my songs', or whatever it's called, it will rename your songs to track-song-artist format and put the song in a folder by the name of the album. It uses the embedded track info from the song file.

I stopped this rename process prematurely and it broke all my links (the song would not play because it couldn't find the song file). At one point I ended up with 3 duplicates of each song. 2 days later I had it all cleaned up. Except for my playlists. Those had to be rebuilt.

So, check that iTunes did not start this renaming process before it attempted to sync your music. I would go into the file system and manually copy the music files to your computer then import them into iTunes.

And yes, I hate the way Apple tries to abstract files from users. Stop renaming my files!

 

[Stewartb]

My CDs are imported just fine. And with iTunes Match activated they have album artwork, too. Your issue sounds like a user issue, not an Apple issue. It sounds like you may be pulling your music from the cloud and your CDs aren't included in those files.

 

[steingar]

Apples don't download tunes from iPads. If you want to transfer tunes from one computer to another you ned to go through another medium. I bought a 32G stick (for all of $10) that I use to port tunes around. I have around a hundred or so gigs of tunes and never lost much of anything I wanted. The stuff I don't like seems to stick around pretty good though.

 

[James331]

Winamp and iPod for the win.

 

[Jaybird180]

>> ...AND do not have an efficient backup protocol.

+1 - all my music, photos, docs etc. are copied automatically to a NAS drive every 24 hrs. When I lost a hard drive a few months ago, everything was back within 2 hrs of hard drive replacement - worst case I may have lost one or two files.

BTW : that NAS drive is backed up to alternative portable hard drives every 2 weeks, I always keep the latest copy in my work as an off-site backup just in case.

How are you implementing this? I manually move my photos, etc to my Synology NAS. I don't bother with another copy because I use RAID 1.

 

[BigBadLou]

Does not compute.
Open iTunes on your computer.
Slip the CD into an attached drive.

No CD, we're talking crApple iPads here.

I bought a 32G stick (for all of $10) that I use to port tunes around.

I have plenty of USB sticks but again, we're talking crApple who is the "innovative" company that does not realize the role that USB media play in our lives.

Winamp and iPod for the win.

You might be onto something. Time to by a $5 MP3 player and put my music on that. Usually they show up as another drive when you plug them in. Now that's what I call good technology.
I might have to give up on this whole experimental crApple platform. Anybody want an iPad?

 

[ejensen]

That sounds very doable, Eddie.

But if NOT USING AN APPLE PRODUCT, you just plug it into the computer, load the CD and drag the songs into the device. WITH APPLE, everything going in must go through, and be approved by, Apple. And if something gets screwed up, you lose.

But it's OK. We should al start getting used to Big Brother watching everything we do. That, and paying subscriptions to use things we have already bought.

You will all be assimilated.

 

[Cpt_Kirk]

HEY!!!! That's MY invention! No stealing!
And you spelled it wrong, it is "crApple".

Sorry. Won't make the mistake again.

 

[Unit74]

My desktop crashed. I built a new Intel NUC. Download ed iTunes. Downloaed iexplorer . Hooked up my iPad which now is homeless and went to import via iexploerer. ITunes autolaunched. Before I could see what we going on, all my burned tunes were literally greying out before my eyes. My iPad and from around 28gigs used to 19 gigs used.

It's clear iTunes deleted them all. All my purchased was there. All the CD music was gone



FaQ Apple and Steve jobs and that other ass hole that took his place.

 

[James331]

No CD, we're talking crApple iPads here.


I have plenty of USB sticks but again, we're talking crApple who is the "innovative" company that does not realize the role that USB media play in our lives.


You might be onto something. Time to by a $5 MP3 player and put my music on that. Usually they show up as another drive when you plug them in. Now that's what I call good technology.
I might have to give up on this whole experimental crApple platform. Anybody want an iPad?

Or upgrade a old iPod classic with a 1tb SSD and a new battery

 

[denverpilot]

You sure you didn't hit "Trust this computer? YES" on the iPad?

Under current versions of iOS the iDevice itself protects against connecting to a new iTunes with "auto launch" turned on.

While the default behaviors are often annoying with iTunes stuff, all of this behavior is documented...

 

[VWGhiaBob]

I use Apple for one reason: Foreflight.

Over the years of migrating to various versions of iPhone, about 90% of my music disappeared...many collections transferred from CD's, playlists...all vanished. Only a few albums remain.

I have given up trying to figure out why. RIP my beautiful Apple music.

I went back to .mp3's on PC. At least you can see them, and there's no strangeness taking them away from you.

Hopefully Foreflight migrates one day to PC!

 

[RJM62]

Recovering music "disappeared" by iTunes used to be a fairly common call for me. I usually referred those clients to my late friend and colleague Stefan, whose specialty was actually data recovery. I'm pretty sure he just recovered them as deleted files rather than farting around with the iTunes software, which he detested.

I also declined to transfer iTunes music to a new computer for clients unless the computer being replaced was still intact (and the songs present) so I could back them up to Some Other Media first. Usually I used write-protectable flash drives that I bought in bulk and on the cheap. Once the songs were on the flash drive, I write-protected it and handled it only outside of iTunes.

I never did bother trying to figure out why iTunes disappeared songs so often. I figured it was a result of either some DRM issue, or of using media management software published by a company that makes a whole mess of money selling music downloads and therefore has little incentive to protect music that was acquired elsewhere.

I also must confess that I think some people are a bit obsessed with using their phones for every possible purpose, even when there's little or no advantage to doing so. For example...

I have a lot of music that I ripped from CDs, and some that I transcoded from WMA to MP3 files back when I had a (legal) Napster account. The music exists on multiple computers and is backed up in multiple locations, along with everything else on my computers.

It also exists on a flash drive that lives in my car radio's USB port. Every year or so I re-save the music, along with whatever additions I've made to it, to a new flash drive. I figure living in the car through winter and summer temperature extremes can't be very good for a flash drive. Besides, they're cheap.

Because the music files contain all the metadata, the radio organizes them nicely and and plays them effortlessly. This makes my lady friend crazy. My lady friend has an iPhone, and she insists that I too should buy an iPhone so I can use the $700.00 phone to play the same music that I'm currently playing using a $4.99 flash drive.

I don't get it. But it drives her bananas. So much, in fact, that I'm starting to wonder about her stability. I expect phone obsessions from young people, not those my own age. But I digress.

My lady friend, upon accepting the fact that I'm much too cheap to buy an iPhone, also asked why I don't at least store the music on my BlackBerry and plug the BB into the car radio. I suppose I could do that if I wanted to by putting the BB in USB storage mode. But again, what's the point? Flash drives are cheap, work fine, are easily replaced, and don't require software that causes songs to mysteriously disappear.

So really, when these sorts of situations happen to people, I sympathize with them. But there's also a part of me that scratches my head and wonders why they don't just transcode the files and save them to a cheap flash drive. I usually decide that it's because unlike me, they haven't yet discovered that computers are like mistresses: They can be a lot of fun, but they are not to be trusted.

Anyway, regarding the OP's situation, if the computer hasn't been used very much since the disappearance, at least some of the songs probably can be recovered using standard data recovery tools. The odds drop dramatically the longer the computer's been running, however.

In the future, please be sure to back up your non-iTunes acquired music to Some Other Media that iTunes cannot directly access or write to. I don't know why iTunes likes to disappear songs (although I do have my hunches), but this is very, very long-standing behavior for that software.

Rich

 

[Unit74]

Yo.... I guess you skipped over the part where I said my computer crashed and I lost everthing. No it was not backed up anywhere. I built a fresh out of the box computer from parts and a clean install of the OS. The files were fine and functioning on the iPad till I plugge it in and iTunes decided I no longer needed to listen to anything not downloaded from them.

Anyone know if there is something I the user agreement about them choosing which files iTunes can manager or they can delete as they see fit? Something that gives them the rights to do so basically?

 

[RJM62]

Yo.... I guess you skipped over the part where I said my computer crashed and I lost everthing. No it was not backed up anywhere. I built a fresh out of the box computer from parts and a clean install of the OS. The files were fine and functioning on the iPad till I plugge it in and iTunes decided I no longer needed to listen to anything not downloaded from them.

Yep, I missed that. But it's actually good news for you! Unless the hard drive is physically damaged, the songs (and whatever else was on it) can still be recovered. Even a neophyte geek should be able to recover them for you with no special software at all. You should even be able to do it yourself with an inexpensive SATA (or EIDE, if it's ancient) to USB adapter.

Even if the drive has been physically damaged, chances are that the data can be recovered. It'll just cost a lot more.

Anyone know if there is something I the user agreement about them choosing which files iTunes can manager or they can delete as they see fit? Something that gives them the rights to do so basically?

No, but I suspect it's buried somewhere in one of the following:

http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iTunesForWindows.pdf

http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html

Rich

EDIT: Assuming that the hardware is intact and your crash was a software one, you can also recover the songs (and whatever else you like) using the bootable Linux distro of your choice and a big enough flash drive to hold the data.

ANOTHER EDIT: You can also use WinPE if you prefer.

So if your crash was a software issue, then in the immortal words of Bobby McFerrin, "Don't worry, be happy." Your songs can be recovered.

 

[Scrabo]

How are you implementing this? I manually move my photos, etc to my Synology NAS. I don't bother with another copy because I use RAID 1.

Use RAID 1 on my computer as well but both the wives and my laptop don't have the ability to use RAID. You can never have enough backups !!

I like having an offsite backup copy, don't trust cloud based solutions. Use SyncFree software to copy from computers to NAS, runs on a schedule

 

[RJM62]

How are you implementing this? I manually move my photos, etc to my Synology NAS. I don't bother with another copy because I use RAID 1.

I haven't really kept track, but in my experience, I'm pretty sure that RAID has caused more data loss incidents than it prevented. RAID controllers sometimes go down with gusto, often taking their whole array with them.

RAID1 is a good solution for availability on mission-critical machines where as close to 100 percent uptime as possible is needed. But I wouldn't trust any RAID array as backup. As long as the drives are on the same controller, I don't care how many of them there are. It's not backup.

Use RAID 1 on my computer as well but both the wives and my laptop don't have the ability to use RAID. You can never have enough backups !!]

Indeed. I've never heard a client utter the phrase "We have too damn many backups!" after a data loss incident.

I like having an offsite backup copy, don't trust cloud based solutions. Use SyncFree software to copy from computers to NAS, runs on a schedule

I trust online backup, but then again I don't. The concerns boil down to two categories: Is the company itself stable and able to reliably provide the promised services, and are they a company that will staunchly defend their customers' data.

I wouldn't use any online backup company as my only backup (they might go belly-up), and I always use my own encryption key that my backup provider doesn't know. This way even if the company were to lose or give up my data, it would be worthless. It's already encrypted by the time it's stored on their servers.

I started using a private encryption key after Carbonite dropped their ads from Rush Limbaugh's show because of some idiotic comment that Limbaugh made. I couldn't care less about Limbaugh, I don't listen to his show, and neither do I care which advertisers sponsor it. But it bothered me that Carbonite CEO David Friend initially said that the ads would stay, but then reversed himself as a widespread boycott from the Left gained traction.

It was the the flip-flop, not his decision to pull the ads, that bothered me. Had Friend simply feigned outrage and dropped Limbaugh's show from the get-go, I would have shrugged; and had he stood his ground and stuck with Limbaugh's show after saying he would, I would have shrugged. I really didn't care one way or the other.

Flip-flopping, however, was unacceptable to me. It persuaded me that Friend was not a guy I could trust to safeguard my data. A person in that position needs to have gonads of steel and be able and willing to stand his ground. It's not a job for a wimp who's intimidated by threats of boycotts. If that's enough to make David Friend pee his pants and cry uncle, then I really don't want his company protecting my data. I switched to BackBlaze and started encrypting my data using a private key.

Rich

 

[Unit74]

Naw...I think the drive is toast. It just clicks rhythmically when powered up. That would be innocent if I could recover it, but the files are not worth the clean room charge.

 

[wsuffa]

Use RAID 1 on my computer as well but both the wives and my laptop don't have the ability to use RAID. You can never have enough backups !!

Trust RAID only as far as you can throw it. I've seen too many installations where RAID has screwed everything up. I do have RAID 6 on a NAS, but that's backed up periodically, and the critical files are sent to an encrypted online storage facility.

I like having an offsite backup copy, don't trust cloud based solutions. Use SyncFree software to copy from computers to NAS, runs on a schedule

Even if you have a cloud backup, the time to recover ~3 TB of data is prohibitive for regular use. Local backup, preferably taken off-site, is really ideal. Cloud for really deep backup if all else fails - but make sure you're using an encrypted solution.