Itunes mess

[withm]

Well, if you're not on Match, then the thing I read wouldn't apply to you anyway.

What it does, is put your music into the cloud so you can listen to it from any copy of iTunes that's online, rather than having to store your library on authorized devices. So anything that's for sale in the iTunes store (whether or not you bought it there) gets a tag that you own it; if you have music that they don't sell, it uploads a copy (which I'm told can take for-freakin'-ever if you have a lot of music).

I'm not bothering with it, myself.

Ok, now I remember reading about that. I already re-loaded the stuff I purchased directly from Itunes. (Yes, even those tracks were missing). But since the Ipod itself is sort of a back up, and since I actually have the cds, I did not opt for the Match.

[susan.wells]

I have had similar situations when I have 1) changed computers and 2) changed OS from Windows to Apple. My tracks were not deleted I just had to locate them by browsing to their stored location. I keep all of my iTunes on an external hard drive (which I back up to another external hard drive) to alleviate situation 1. I have found for situation 2 the Windows OS could not handle special characters that the Apple OS has no issues with. Windows therefore changed the file name to something with an "_" which is not how the file is recognized in the Apple OS (e.g., if the song name has an !, :, (, ) ...). Once I've browsed to the file to re-establish the link, I've had no further issues. I hope this helps. I haven't found an easier solution to date and it is a real PIA if you have many albums to restore.