Remove Missing Tracks From iTunes
If you hold all of your music on an external drive and move it around a bit to keep it organized like me inevitably you will get broken/dead/missing tracks in your iTunes library. It’s not a big deal to neglect instead of say when you plug in you iPod and that track is needed when syncing and you get this annoying prompt.
I used to use the Super Remove Dead Tracks v2.0 applescript to cure these ailments, but with iTunes 7.5 the applescript breaks and it hasn’t been updated since April 2007 so for all intents and purposes it is dead.
With some research I found Paul Mayne’s solution which involved a mashup of smart and static playlists and removing the remainder, but this didn’t work for me either because the process that should have filtered out the missing tracks just didn’t happen, but it did grease the wheels.
So I put my thinking cap on and found this ghetto-savvy way of doing it.
- Go to your full library and select all of your tracks.
- Get Info - CMD I
- Set all of your files to have an obscure ID3 tag that you never use - say BPM to an arbitrary number.
- Wait for all the tags to process - this may take a while depending on the size of your library.
- Go to Library > Music
- Sort by BPM (or your chosen arbitrary ID3 tag) - Change view options to add that (BPM) column if it is not showing: CMD J
- Select Tracks with no BPM set
- Remove them from your library.
This is a pain in the ass I know, but like I said it’s a ghetto solution. Hopefully Doug will update his Super Remove Dead Tracks script for 7.5 - but if you ask me this is something that Apple should handle on their own.
Does anyone have a better way of cleaning out the junk?
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Yeah, managing music inside iTunes is a pain sometimes. I complained to Dan last night that if iTunes Store didn’t carry an album, you apparently can’t download the album art from them. Stupid. Speaking of external drives, I keep meaning to get one of those Lacie drives.
left this nugget of wisdom January 8th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
This worked for me. I moved my iTunes Library to an external drive and found that many of the tracks in the Library showed up as missing. By using your ghetto-fab method, I was able to see that 11,728 tracks out of 27,068 were missing! Yow! Now I’m reimporting the library. It’s a pain, but at least it works.
left this nugget of wisdom April 20th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
@zweirad I’m glad this method worked for you. By keeping your iTunes library on an external drive you’ll save yourself a lot of annoyance. I hate having most of my disk space occupied by my library.
left this nugget of wisdom April 20th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Phew, thanks. This is seriously nasty but it does appear to work. Much like iTunes itself.
As a Windows user, I often wonder if I have the energy required to wriggle myself free of Vista and make a move (or, rather, a return — I was a genuine devotee during the 80s and early 90s) to Macintosh, but there are so many occasions I find myself annoyed by missing and idiotic features on the iPhone, in Safari and particularly in iTunes, that I can’t bring myself to do it.
Put simply, iTunes on Windows is awful — slow, esoteric, unintuitive, resource hungry, and with a non-standard UI that is not just unfamiliar but also hangs at the slightest provocation — and I’d wager it dissuades more people than it converts. It needs a ground up rewrite.
left this nugget of wisdom April 22nd, 2008 at 4:10 pm