Dealing with the iPhone 3G and iTunes 7.7.1 disappearing media bug

August 13, 2008 – 11:55 pm

After being told by a friend of their frustrations with their iPhone 3G and the disappearing media when using iTunes 7.7.1, I myself was hit with the bug.  I think they jinxed me with Schroedinger’s iPhone bug:  once I knew about it, I was sure to come across it myself.  Just my luck, yesterday morning my 16GB iPhone suddenly showed no music or any other media of any kind, but still showed that I had only 1GB free.  I don’t know if this is isolated to Windows, but this is how I dealt with it.

Once upon a time, you were able to mount an ipod as a drive letter and play with the files.  This seems to be no more.   I was able to delete some movie files I had on the iPhone and was able to sync music onto to it!  Lo and behold the media appeared on the iPhone.   So how to get all that music off the iPhone to resync it and get the music recognized again?  Enter iPhoneList.

Before starting any of this, I deleted any music from my Library (they were just links to a network share after all) that was not checked, and then unchecked all the remaining music.  This cleared the database from having any references to the music files.

The iPhoneList software seems to be directly related to another program called iPhoneBrowser.  The latter is newer stuff, while the former seems to be an earlier version of the code.  The iPhoneBrowser software, which I ran across first, allows you to view all the folders in the iPhone’s filesystem and edit.  I was able to select and delete music files, but the software seems to backup every music file it touches, even for deletions.   It’s a pain to do this folder by folder as it waits about 2-5 minutes for the sync, and there were 50 folders on my iPhone.  After 3 folders I couldn’t take it anymore and found a few things that promised to mount as drive letters, but which only ended up crashing without getting to a GUI.  Once I found iPhoneList, it was a matter of doing a Select All in each of the 47 remaining folders and then Delete.  Still tedious for 50 folders, but much quicker than waiting all that time.

Then just start up iTunes.  Before the sync takes place, I can see that the space taken up on my iPhone is now just a few hundred MB.  Go ahead and check all the songs again, and sync the iPhone to get everything back on there!  Voila, it works!  Honestly, this beats screwing around with reloading iTunes and wiping the phone with older firmwares.  try this out for yourself if your iPhone suddenly decides not to play nice with the media files.  As I understand there are utilities for managing the files on the iPhone for MacOSX, so you should have a solution on that platform as well.

Meanwhile, let me take the time to recommend a really great app for accessing files on the iPhone: Datacase.  I’m really loving all these wifi enabled apps, like 1Passwd, Stanza, and now Datacase.  I like it so much, it is honestly the first iPhone app that I have paid for.  Had I been quick enough, I would have grabbed NetShare, too!

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