Apple - Verify that entries in iTunes are actually on disk

1. Choose Edit > Select all.

2. Now choose File > New playlist from selection. Call the playlist "Exist". Only the listings that exist on disk will be added to this playlist.

3. Now create a smart playlist called "Do Not Exist" with the conditions: Playlist is not "Exist", and Media Kind is Music.

The smart playlist called "Do Not Exist" now contains all the audio listings that do not exist on disk. To remove these listings, select all of them and hold down Shift as you press Delete.

User "sentinel"'s approach is simple and elegant, but I cannot make it work. Steps 1 & 2 produce a playlist with ALL items, including those in the Library that do not have files on the disk. The Select All in Step 1 selects all items, whether present on disk or not, and thus the playlist created from selection includes the bogus entries as well. Therefore, Step 3 yields nothing. (Am I missing something?)

Meanwhile I found a post elsewhere from someone calling him/herself dlegros in 2005, and though it is a workaround, it does work:

1. Caveat: for this to work you need to use a field in the Get Info form that you do not use or do not care about, because you are going to ultimately erase any information that currently exists in that field for every song in the library. In this example we are going to use BPM (Beats Per Minute) as this seems rarely used and is not important to most people. If BPM is important to you, don't do this, or find another field you don't care about. You must use a field that is editable in the Get Info form.

2. Display your Music Library.

3. Add the BPM column to your view (in Windows right click the column headers and select Beats Per Minute).

4. Edit >> Select All

5. Open the Get Info form (File >> Get Info, OR Ctrl-I, OR right click one of the selected items and choose Get Info). Make sure all of your songs are still selected and that the title on the top of the Get Info form says "Mulitple Item Information".

6. Change the BPM field to 999, make sure the check box next to that field is the only one checked in the form so that no other data will change, then click OK and wait for the library to process the change. This will only change items when iTunes can find the file on disk.

7. Click the BPM column header to sort by BPM. Everything that has blank BPM, or BPM not equal to 999 is a missing file. Because you sorted, you see all the missing items together. Select the block of missing items and delete them.

8. Though not completely necessary, Select All once again, Get Info, and change the BPM field to blank, select the checkbox next to BPM, and OK to reset them all to blank.

9. Select the column headers and remove Beats Per Minute from the view.

If there is a more straightforward approach, please let me know :)