Oh, oh... my iPhone seems to have deleted part of my iTunes music library!

[inlayterms]

Hi folks, seems like I'm in a bit of a pickle here and I don't know what to do. Hopefully, somebody will be able to help.

Last year I imported all of my CDs into iTunes using Apple Lossless format. I have about 500 CDs and stored them all on my Time Capsule external hard drive.

In January of this year, I bought my first iPhone. A couple of months ago, I synced about 1000 songs from my iTunes onto the iPod in the iPhone so I can have some of my music on the go. From my 500 CDs, I synced several songs from about 200 of them.

Last night, however, I went into iTunes and played some music through my stereo system. But, some of the songs were not located and were tagged with the infamous "!". I then went into my Time Capsule where my music library is stored and noticed that, from every CD from which I synced some songs to my iPhone, only the songs that were synced were left in the library for that album - all other songs on that album were deleted! For example, if I synced Tracked 1, 2 and 3 from Album X, all other songs were gone, but those tracks remained. Conversely, if I did not sync any songs from any particular album, that album remained intact.

Specs wise, my Time Capsule is 1T and my music library took up about 150G. The funny thing is that, although Time Capsule globally still shows that 830G are unused (which was the amount of available space I had before I bought my iPhone), my music library in Time Capsule where my music is stored has shrunk from 150G to about 100G.

Is my music lost? I can't find it, and I don't know what to do. Any suggestions? Thanks.

[inlayterms]

I'm going to post this in the iPhone and the Mac Users Hangout threads in General Chat. Mods, please delete this thread.