Can I get iTunes to show all songs with an error status?

I'm using iTunes Match on my computer, but I have some titles in my library that are missing the actual media.

Here is my process:

• convert a cd to mp3
• put an album in my iTunes
• iTunes Match makes the match
• after that match, I delete the source because it is in the cloud

But when i do that, iTunes puts an exclamation point at the beginning of the line of titles from this album because it cannot find the file anymore. I just have to delete these titles and next time they will be downloaded from the cloud.

Is there a way to select all these "not found" files and delete them at once ? because if i don't do that, next time iTunes will go to such a song, it will skip it instead of downloading from iTunes Match.

It would be ideal to sort the list of songs with this special column so I can clean things up.

Solution 1:

You can add the columns iCloud Status and iCloud Download and sort song lists by those criteria.

All songs that didn't upload will include the missing tracks so you can clean them appropriately.

You could also attack the inverse problem. Make sure everything you care about is in the iCloud and matched. Once that process is complete, you could turn off iTunes Match on that computer, quit iTunes and archive the entire music folder. Then you could delete the library folder and start with a fresh library and turn on match to restore all playlists, metadata, play counts, etc...

At that point, you could decide to re-import some or all of the songs so you don't need to download all the music again, but most with broadband are happy to just re-download what they need rather than have everything in one place.

I have done this exact process, and when I go to iTunes and select a track I want to delete, the following dialog pops up:

If you are not getting that dialog, then I can only presume some other corruption is present in your Library.

Solution 2:

Over in the post "Can I easily view all songs that iTunes can't locate in Finder?" is a great workaround to this issue. You will end up with a playlist of active song files and dead song files.