Here's a weird one. Today, I'm minding my own business when I notice that iTunes is refusing to play certain tracks in my Library.
I use iTunes to manage the organization of my mp3s, which makes it pretty easy to locate in the Finder the files that won't play... and what do I find in my music library but a bunch of .JPG files!
Each of these image files is named identically with one of the .mp3 files - so right before "06 I Am the Walrus.mp3" is "06 I Am the Walrus.JPG". This occurs in numerous folders. In the folders in which I find these files, sometimes I find a corresponding image with every song file, sometimes just a few... most often there are none.
These photos appear to have come from a very large collection of clip-art photos that I have on my hard disk. They are not managed with iPhoto (they are way too numerous... they'd bring it to it's knees...) but some of my personal photos are managed by iPhoto. I do have iTunes 3.01 and iPhoto 2.
I don't do any fancy-schmancy AppleScripting with iTunes (or iPhoto... or the Finder... or the Terminal for that matter), so I'm wondering "What the heck???". I've run Disk Utility on that volume... and everything checked out fine.
A Finder search found about 300 .JPGs infesting my music libarary, and based on random sampling, each of them corresponds to a file in my iTunes library that iTunes claims that it can't find now... even though after clearing out the .JPGs, those .mp3s are right where they ought to be, based on iTunes own naming and filing conventions. (Yeah, I know it keeps its own seperate database...) Unfortunately, if I rebuild my library, I'll lose my playlists. <sigh>
In fact, I'm wondering if the fact that iTunes keeps its own db is the source of the problem... if that became confused, could it think that other file IDs (like my images) corresponded to the song files it expects to find in the Library... and if it found them outside the library directories, wouldn't it attempt to move it to the correct location? Hmmm.
I don't expect any explainations, really. It's too weird! I thought I'd log this here, just in case someone else ever experiences something like this so they won't be discounted as a lone nutcase.
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