iTunes mash-up?

[js.fink]

Just trying to track down a problem I’m encountering with iTunes, which may be SuperDuper related. I regularly sync my three hard drives. Once in a while I change my start-up disk. A few times now, after several sessions of syncing, my iTunes starts misbehaving: I click on a track, it refuses to play; it loses its album art; clicking on the actual file in the iTunes folder also fails to play the track. I’ve had to manually reimport 7500 tracks and album art from either my iPod or one of the other drives that by chance has a particular track still intact. Nobody at Apple Care had ever heard of this problem before. Once I’d got everything working again (I think) I erased one of my drives and cloned it from the drive that’s A-OK. Now I’m too inhibited to try Super Duper again, fearing the mad iTunes mash-up. Anybody encountered this weirdness?

[dnanian]

I've got a pretty large/extensive iTunes library (over 40K tracks) that I copy all the time, and I've never had anything remotely similar happen...

[js.fink]

Any idea what else might be causing such a bizarre problem?

[dnanian]

Nothing comes to mind, other than the obvious: the disk is going bad in a way that's not signaling an error when the files are copied. I assume you're always seeing this on the "source" drive: how old is it?

[js.fink]

Two years old. No sign of any ill health; I use TechTool every couple of weeks as a general tonic. Really, this is such a mystery!

[dnanian]

It really is; I've never heard of anything similar.

[js.fink]

Hi, Dave,
Found a discussion in an iTunes forum — a guy found his iTunes files disappearing in the same way as he moved them around from computer to computer. Ghost files remain — the icon, the information, but not the track itself. More evidence to suggest computers are not machines but a race of organic beings with agendas of their own.

[dnanian]

And they're taking over! Aaaah! Hide your music!