commentary iTunes 7 is so not ready for prime time.
In fact, it's hard to believe Apple has released such a buggy program. On my Windows machine at work, I have been battling iTunes 7 nearly every time I use it. From its just refusing to start up after several tries to requiring me to select new libraries every third time I open it, this little jukebox and I have not been getting along. Most of my problems have been related to sluggish performance -- that is, iTunes freezing up and acting slow in general. I noticed that while this is happening, my CPU usage shoots up as much as 80 percent. And that's not even playing music or video -- that's just navigating around. This just shouldn't be happening on a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 with a gig of RAM.
Okay, so that's annoying. But more disturbing is a recent phenomenon I've been noticing, which I shall call "the disappearing of purchased content" (DOPC?) issue. This has happened to me on not one, but two different PCs, running in different locations (home and work). Over the weekend, I purchased four songs on iTunes and used them to burn a mix with some music I already owned. When I opened iTunes the next day, the songs were nowhere to be found. And when I selected the Check For Purchases option in the Store drop-down menu, I got this message: "All purchases have been downloaded for this account. Purchases can only be downloaded once." Well, that sucks, because I just spent my hard-earned cash (albeit -- and thankfully -- only [US$] four bucks) on some music, and it disappeared from iTunes for no logical reason. Yesterday, I bought a TV show and a movie on iTunes so that I could test out a new iPod accessory. Today, the files were missing from the iTunes library. Seriously ... WTF? This is just getting ridiculous. I spent US$17 for the privilege of easy and fast access to those files.
After a little searching, I was able to turn up my movie and TV show. It turns out that these two items -- which are the only ones I've purchased since upgrading to iTunes 7 -- were saved in an odd location. While all of my previous purchases were logically saved to my general iTunes Music folder, under My Music > iTunes, the most recent ones were saved in an iTunes Music folder that the program created here: My Music > iTunes > Previous iTunes Libraries. Um, Okay -- why? I certainly didn't specify such a thing in my preferences. At least I found my files, but the whole beauty of iTunes is that it makes media management such an easy task, and version 7 is not doing its job.
CNET.com senior editor James Kim was a witness to my pain; he hasn't experienced such woes himself (luck?), but he is also baffled that a fix to iTunes 7 isn't priority numero uno over at Apple. After all, millions of people use the software and store. Are the rest of you as irritated as I am?
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MG
27/09/2006 04:03 PM
I've not experienced the disappearing songs, however there is another frustration with itunes for me. I cannot use the new cool cover art flow gizmo view. It displays an ugly grey box with "itunes is unable to browse cover art on this computer" message. ive upgraded my graphics card driver to latest, upgraded quicktime, checked most other specs are up to date, got full hardware accelleration, but still cant use this feature. disappointed. oh, and they moved the convenient burn disc button from the top right panel to bottom. that sux too.
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{_sAMU}
27/09/2006 04:48 PM
I havn't experienced any of those things becasue I stoped using it when all my song would play with a very large amount of static in the background, but before I noticed I updated my ipod and the songs on that played normaly, cept for the bugginess of the updating (would keep updating randomly)
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Bryce
27/09/2006 04:49 PM
my recent upgrade to itunes 7 has not be as bad as that experiece, but i do notice alot more cpu being usedthat version 6. another issue that has happened to me is windows installer everynow and again must configure windows for no apparent reason. iTunes 7 has alot of potential especailly with the find album are feature which i love, apple just need to iron out a few bugs first
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Alan O'Callaghan
28/09/2006 09:20 AM
I downloaded iTunes 7 in the hope of solving my problems... Over time I've encountered problems with iTunes (I'm using 6.0.4 with Mac OS 10.3.9). I began by importing my CD collection. Over time, tracks or entire albums or playlists disappeared entirely from the hard drive. I thought I had done something wrong. I have downloaded a number of items (albums and singles) from iTunes Australia; and have begun importing my reel-to-reel and cassette collections. Currently, I have 1,500+ items. The problem I constantly encounted with the (iTunes) program is files that mysteriously. randomly and spontaneously delete from the computer, never to be seen again - not even in the Trash. A few days ago, I found 400-500 hundred items missing - little exclamation (!) marks beside the missing items in the Library and associated Playlists. They are not in the iTunes Folder, nor the Trash (which had incidentally not been emptied). My son's computer did the same. Sometimes it's whole albums, sometimes partial albums (one or two items), sometimes entire Playlists. Having to import them again and again is tedious and is beginning turn me off iTunes. The fact that these files aren't even in the Trash suggests there is a fault in the Program. I have found no reference to this in iTunes Help, iTunes website or independent Manuals. I Googled "iTunes "files disappear"". Guess what? It happens to many others. My experience is that Compilations (multiple artists) are vulnerable. I had an Andrea Bocelli album imported from a CD. All his solos remained, but two duets disappeared; weeks later, the lot. "Grease" (soundtrack) bought from iTunes Australia includes multiple artists - gone completely. I DO have back-ups by the way. I might as well just play the CD's; I have to get them out so often. Do any of your other readers experience these phenomena? Or should I go back to my trusty 35 year old reel-to-reel deck and hi fi system? Can anyone help me?
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arty
28/09/2006 10:12 AM
Guess you'd better download 7.0.1 which was released today
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KM
28/09/2006 06:32 PM
I'm fortunate to be using iTunes on an iBook, and have found no problems at all, either with previous versions of v7. I have used it previously on IBM compatible PC, and found it significantly slower there. So from my own limited experience, it seems that the IBM version is not quite as good as the Mac version. However, I looked at the apple website, and they already have a lot of fixes, solutions and advice for the problems raised in this article. I wonder if many folks, including the cNet writers, have referred to them yet?
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visitor
03/10/2006 01:54 PM
how much is Bill paying you for this FUD?
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JB
08/10/2006 11:32 PM
CPU usage shooting up to 80% using iTunes 7 on a PC. I was getting that with all versions of iTunes I've used on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 600m). I was actually hoping that the news version would bring an end to my CPU-hungry iTunes, but I'm a bit reluctant to upgrade having read this.
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aastra
23/11/2006 02:01 PM
I experienced the disappearing iTunes problem today. All of my purchased music is gone, all of my playlists are gone. I'm using version 6. Is there anything we can try to recover the lost tracks?
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Mike
01/12/2006 05:17 PM
My problem with ITunes 7.0.2.16 are disappearing TV shows. I've downloaded shows and, once I've watched them, they disappear from my iPod, but still show in my iTunes library.
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Laeny
29/12/2006 04:38 PM
All my songs I transferred onto i-tunes have disappeared and I am worried thatwhenI go toupdate my ipod all the songs will be deleted... why is this happening??
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jennifer
05/01/2007 05:55 PM
I got a new IPOD for Christmas and I lost my whole freaking library of MP3's when I tried to convert all the songs from windows media to Itunes. I lost almost 3000 songs (about 85% of my total library). Some show up, others don't. Whats wierd is that the song title will show up but I get a message that says that Itunes can not find the file it is linked to. Sure enough, I can't find it either. I did happen to find about 100 files in the recycle bin and restored them (although they still show the songs name as "D2857" and "D8446." Fun, huh?
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dhenderson
14/01/2007 08:59 AM
I just downloaded Itunes 7.0 and half of my music library was deleted. This was not just downloaded music, but music copied from CDs. I bought a new computer about a year ago and it deleted all of the files I had transferred from that computer. I am truly bummed.
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dhenderson
15/01/2007 03:02 AM
I left a comment yesterday about music being deleted ehen I installed 7. I did find my music. 7 didn't rcognize the music I had previously transferred in with Tune Transfer. I imported all of it into Itunes and everything seems to be fine.
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ROBB1
16/01/2007 07:12 AM
I first got worried when songs started appearing with the ! next to them. I tried to trace the song file in the library only to find it completely gone. I then started keeping a note of exactly how many songs I had in the library so I could tell if any more vanished. They have, and with the time I spent putting 13,000 songs on separate hard drive for security. I'm getting quite testy about the thought of doing it all again. The worst thing is I don't even know which songs have disapeared as there is absolutely no trace of them ever existing. Kind of ironic that I changed to Mac for the systems stability eh?
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KANCHAN
23/01/2007 11:38 PM
WHEN I AM TRYING TO INSTALL ITUNE 7 I GET A ERROR INSTALLER ENCOUNTERED ERRORS BEFORE ITUNE CAN BE CONFIGURED
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Asquared
24/01/2007 12:24 AM
Has anyone experienced iTunes changing the pitch of your music? I am a musician and I like to play along with my favourite tunes and I noticed since I installed iTunes, al lot of my tunes are now slightly out of pitch (about 1/4 tone) which is a real bummer cause I'm constantly re-tuning my guitar.
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Bisonrock
18/02/2007 08:17 PM
Wow. I'm amazed, I just found this forum and I've experienced so many of these problems. I'm a PC user who has been using a Mac for a few months now, including ITunes -- and I've noticed the deleted song thing for a while now ,but thought maybe Ijust had to do a lengthy search to find the material. Essentially, after I copy (import) CDs to iTunes, tehy are recognized in my storage folder (stored in an external drive) for a few days, and then reported as "the song could not be found, would you like to locate it". Often, now, the song is gone. Zero trace. As bad as people say Winamp was, I NEVER had this issue of completely vanished songs. Macs are supposed to be user friendly? Try confusing and non-logical in how they store data, and also completely tone-deaf as to common problems.
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tobanion
20/02/2007 09:39 AM
I'm also having that frustrating problem with the iTunes purchased TV shows disappearing off my iPod after I watch them. They ARE still in my iTunes library, but won't sync back onto my iPod. Does anyone know how to fix this? I want to be able to purchase movies that my son can watch and RE-watch on a long plane ride... help!
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grimfandango
06/03/2007 06:48 AM
I'm seeing the same problem as most of the other unlucky people here - the ! next to a bunch of [random] files that refuse to play. In an effort to figure this out, I thought I'd detail my setup exactly - if anyone notices anything in common, please let me know. I'm running the latest version of iTunes 7.x on Windows with a 5g video iPod. I occasionally plug my girlfriends 5g video iPod in and copy music from my library to her iPod. Occasionally I used SharePod (a freeware util) to copy a couple of mp3s from one iPod to my desktop, and then on to the other iPod via iTunes. The information in the iTunes database seems ok, you can still see the song info, and the file still exists, but the file location in the iTunes database either isn't correct or corrupt I think. My 2 cents
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Zeitgeistxx
09/03/2007 06:42 AM
I have also lost music using iTunes. The first time this happened, I had just updated to iTunes 7, and decided to play a few newly downloaded songs residing on my PowerBook G4 from my Windows XP SP2 machine. The next day, I tried to play them from the mac, and they were nowhere to be found. I thought I was losing my mind! I looked everywhere, and I know my way around a computer. So, I called them up, jumped through all of the hoops and the tech guy could not find them either, with no explanation as to why this happened. I was very upset, as data loss caused by an application is just bad, bad, bad. They decided to credit my account for the lost songs, for some reason, and I was happy with that, but very worried about using iTunes. Well, since then I haven't had a problem, until today. I opened iTunes, and it seemed to be confused about its library location. I couldn't think why this was happening, as nothing had been changed on the machine, except some OS X updates, but nothing related to iTunes. The last I had used iTunes was test playing some music from my PowerBook to my husband's MacBook Pro. After that, I hadn't played any music on my laptop for 3 days or so, and when I opened iTunes, it would not load any of my music. The files were there, they weren't empty, and the standard operations with the .xml and Library file didn't do anything. I thought perhaps my current iTunes was broken, and upgraded to 7.1, which did not fix the problem. I had to import my entire collection from my external hard disk backup. This seems to have worked for now. So, this has happened twice to me, both times on my PowerBook G4, and both times after streaming music to iTunes on another machine. Yuck.
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dude
11/03/2007 02:33 AM
I can't get vista to recognize my itunes files, have not lost music , pointed to correct file Itunes just wont go there? Any ideas
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kato92
19/03/2007 05:59 AM
CAn somebody answer how to get music back to itunes library to disappeared but still in itunes folder
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hgluck
27/03/2007 04:22 AM
I also just bought anew Imac and moved all my music over to the mac, I have it backed up several differeent places and all of them have the lost the music , no reference no nothing except it still rsides on one old almost out of power 30g ipod. I think I will have to sell my 4 ipods and mac and move back to the pc world. At least I never lost music there
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okaron
10/05/2007 11:29 AM
I have also lost TV shows off of my Ipod after watching them. They just disapear. I think I should be able to put what I want on my ipod and I should be able to rewatch these episodes. I have the 80g it has plenty of room for these shows...so why can't I have them all on there!?!
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Clive
29/05/2007 01:33 AM
I have experienced all of the problems listed above. Files suddewnly developing an excalmation point and complete collections of an artist's work disappearing from both Itunes and from the hard drive. I started off being very impressed with Itunes but these recent experiences have taken all the fun out of it. One reader siad that Apple has posted fixes on it's website. If somebody could post a link that would be brilliant - or did I stop reading too soon?
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Tom
14/07/2007 09:55 PM
I also get the exclamation point and sudden disappearance of entire CDs that I have ripped onto iTunes. I hear a lot of the same complaints. ANY SOLUTIONS??????
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allyson
18/07/2007 05:07 AM
yes. i am seriously hating itunes. i just purchased twelve episodes of a show, and it has disappeared. :(
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anita
22/09/2007 10:50 PM
Question: if this is happening to all of us and we are all 'victimized' this way (financially and shrink therapy) ... why is there NO solution or sound coming from Apple!? Grrr *!/.'*.. Big guy with IPhone trash.. we're paying to be play with beautiful toys that won't work!?! I must be grazy.. !What's Bill's phonenumber?
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karlakamper
27/10/2007 08:47 PM
my entire itunes program has disappeared from my computer. Anyone else ever heard of this?
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aarpskier
30/12/2007 05:30 PM
Same thing has happened to me twice in the last week. 650 songs gone! What's the alternative?
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mattgoodie
16/01/2008 01:53 AM
any fixes to this ? any solution ? i just lost over 90GB OF MUSIC!!! GONE! Could it be external hard drive issue ???? Please help, thx.
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mdweinb
25/01/2008 03:11 PM
Very disappointed. I bought my daughter a classic 2 years ago. She has 20 gb of content stored. It was actually erased from her PC on iTunes upgrade. I don't know her 'mac' account and can't authorize her computer. How do I contact these guys. I spend too much time doing home tech support for this buggy software. But my daughter is devistated so I need to get this solid. Does anyone know of an iTunes version that is reliable.
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ljlrplay
01/02/2008 04:57 PM
Using a PC - iTunes library has disappeared 4 times in last 4 months with no apparent explanation. My solution is to rip all my music into my Windows Media File. That way when my iTunes library empties itself, I can re-import my music (2.5 days worth of music!). It is not ideal, but better than having to rip all those CDs over again. I have wasted hours with this problem!
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dad no.1
04/02/2008 08:31 AM
doesent anyone have an answer to the exclamation marks in the i tunes music library
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Hagrid
06/02/2008 12:35 PM
Thanks for this information. It was very helpful in locating missing iTunes downloads.
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iPODisaster
20/02/2008 03:53 PM
I purchased an iPOD Classic thinking that I could use it immediately especially after spending a significant amount for it along with accessories and an iTunes card. What a nightmare! I have been on the computer for hours trying to get the iPOD set up with the abbreviated instructions provided in my box, trying to validate my Apple ID which the system insists is incorrect after multiple attempts and attempting to redeem my iTunes card in the iTunes store with no less than 10 attempts "Session Has Timed Out". How frustrating! What was Apple thinking? What a piece of junk!
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Alex Levy
28/02/2008 04:35 AM
I have had the 'exclamation mark' problem for a while now. Today I decided to run an error check and when I restarted my pc it started the error check and restored all my lost music files and they work now. All you have to do: Click Start->My computer Right click on your hard drive-->click properties-->tools then click error check. It will say that next time your computer is turned on it will run an error check. Restart your computer and leave it to run the error check (this may take an hour or so). Then just launch iTunes and it should work fine! Good luck!!
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Will
20/03/2008 04:52 AM
The Same thing has been happening to me ever since i upgraded to 7.0. But the crazy thing is (and THIS PISSES ME OFF EVEN MORE), is the songs disappearing the most are usually my top 25 or top rated songs. and i never notice until i realize i havn't heard said favorite song in a while! I'm afraid to uprage to 7.6 because of this crap.
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Robert
05/04/2008 05:42 AM
Welcome me to the club! I just installed the latest iTunes on my 64-bit Windows boot (on a dual-boot) and pointed it to my iTunes library on F: drive. Woosh! A whole bunch of songs, mainly mp3 rips off of my hundreds of CDs, gone. Any way to count/see which songs are no longer available? I'll need to copy these back off my 80GB iPOD. yay - great being anal. ;) And then I'm going to copy my 5000+ songs somewhere as backup to avoid this in the future. A class action suit or large petition sounds like a couple of good ideas. This type of idiocy costs people time AND money. Like any of us has much of either.
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stpetecoyote
12/05/2008 04:14 AM
I am using a mac, and 2 times in the past 2 weeks my entire library of music is gone, I have to import all the music from the hard drive again. Luckily I didn't LOSE anything but still it is really annoying and it has become useless to put anything in a playlist when it will only be deleted a week later :-(
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gadgetgirl
16/05/2008 09:57 AM
Am seeing LOTS of the same problems, hope someone out there is ready to post a marvellous help! I had 12,000 songs on an external HD and decided to download itunes 7.6 directly to the EHD instead of my desktop PC. Seemed to do well and everything played. Then I noticed a music file with the playlists had been put on the desktop afterall. I copied all to the EHD and changed the path in itunes settings. The songs show up with random ! and, of course, those don't play...just the error message asking if I would like to locate them....some smart person please help soon before I throw all the ipods out the window....
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AndrewGarber
16/09/2008 12:06 PM
I have the same problem everything I purchased in the last couple weeks diappeared from my ITUNES Library the files are on my iPHONE but somehow they disappeared from my Library? What? I paid for these files? What is the deal?
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