Another MASSIVE ISSUE with iTunes 11.1

I had thought that the problems with Podcasts in iTunes 11.1 (and 11.1.1) were insane and painful, but I had found work-arounds and had been able to soldier on, until I did a sync of my iPhone today after installing 11.1.1. I got an error that many of my music files couldn’t be synced because they couldn’t be found. Now this was VERY concerning. As I said in my previous post, I have been using iTunes for nearly a decade. I have moved my entire music collection to it and am 100% dependent on it now, syncing several i-Devices. Having podcasts deleted silently was amazingly painful and took days of carefully restoring from backups and re-downloading in order to feel confident that I had gotten everything back. This was incredibly scary. I started to look in my library at some of the files that it had said were missing, and I saw lots of stuff like this:

Screen Shot 2013-10-05 at 1.08.41 PM

That is that the metadata was COMPLETELY INCORRECT. However, this was worse than iTunes messing up it’s own track database. When I went to the disk where the files where supposed to be stored, they were missing. Not in the trash can, GONE.

THIS IS AN INSANELY SERIOUS PROBLEM. Luckily, I have my backups and can restore them, but I can’t use iTunes. At least not 11.1.X. Which means I can’t use iOS7 if I am going to sync my devices. Luckily, I hadn’t done that with most of my devices yet.

Right now I am looking at downgrading to iTunes 10.7 as described here; or iTunes 11.0.5 as described here. I will update if either of those works.

In the longer term, I think I will need to switch off using iTunes to manage my music, podcast and video library completely. At the very least, I will need to keep a shadow library that is separate from what iTunes manages since I can no longer trust iTunes with my files.

[Update 10.5.13]
Was able to downgrade to 11.0.5 successfully and restore the files deleted by iTunes. In the end, iTunes deleted 1750 music tracks; and another 1000 podcasts. I can’t believe that Apple would ship this…

7 thoughts on “Another MASSIVE ISSUE with iTunes 11.1”

  1. Thank you for the heads-up on this. It really is insane! I have been lurking forums due to problems w/podcasts- could not delete, could not download episodes and sync to iPod. Now my music is in danger! I will try the down grade.

    It really shakes confidence in Apple. Now what….

  2. I feel your iTunes pain!
    I was transferring an iTunes library from a friend’s Windows8 laptop (argghhh!) over to a Mac laptop running 10.8 (convinced him to “See the light”). Using the Migration Assistant, things looked fine, until I rebooted the Mac and launched iTunes. All but 3 songs of 1700 were gone, thanks to a bug in iTunes 11. Luckily, I still had his original Library on his PC.
    Did some research online and learned about the iTunes Match bug which deletes files from unsuspecting users’ machines… arghh!!! Turned off Match, recopied the iTunes Library to his Mac and all seemed fine.
    As the old saying goes, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”
    Yeah, I’ll say. One I can’t imagine anyone wanting!

  3. I tried the downgrade but the iTunes wouldn’t start and gave the message that the library .tll was made by a newer version.

  4. @Alison, I actually switched back to an older version of my library from the library backups. Check in your iTunes folder under “Previous iTunes Libraries” if you don’t have another backup.

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