Disappearing GBs on Apple

[Milestones]

I have been going through to bring back music on my Apple desktop, which oddly does not play after an upgrade to Sonoma.  But it has been easy enough to bring it back through Finder.  However, I sure am experiencing weird things on available hard drive space.  I was up around 20 GBs left a few weeks ago.  Then I was hanging around 15.  After a two-day span, I now have 2.93 left.  I have actually been getting rid of music--shifting to external or deleting entirely--as I go along.  I have been deleting far more than adding.

Anyone know why I have lost so much space?

 

 

[Kevin Bresnahan]

On Windows, you can do a search on file size to find large files hogging drive space. On Windows, one of the biggest files is hiber.sys, which is a system backup file created for the hibernate function. Maybe Apple does something similar?

[Steve Gray]

Have you actually emptied the trash? Putting something in the trash doesn't actually delete it in case you want to bring it back

[Milestones]

I am emptying trash continually!

I just don't get how can I delete material and wind up losing another 10 GBs.  

I am now second-guessing my decision to purchase an Apple.  

[Milestones]

I think sometimes things are not deleted when I think they are.

And for two albums, I cannot fully delete then; I just don't have the option.

 

  

Here is my predicament/mystery.  1 GB can hold 16 hours of music.  I am devoting about 350 GB to music.  That would give me 5,600 hours of music.  Yet, as near as I can tell, I only have about 1,800 hours of music on the HD.   How on earth can this be?

 

 

 

 

[mjzee]

Depends on the file size, which is dependent on 1) how long (time-wise) the track is, and 2) the encoding rate.  An mp3 file encoded @ 256 kbps doesn't take up much room at all.  The same file in AIFF format (CD format) is huge.  WAV or AAC files are about half the size of AIFF, but still huge compared to mp3.  Bit rate is also important: all your files should be encoded @ 16 bit.  If you encode @ 24 bit, that greatly increases the size of the file, with very little benefit.

[rostasi]

What mjzee said is a lot of it. The "1 GB can hold 16 hours of music" statement is relative.
At 320kbps, for instance, 1 GB is only equal to a teeny bit over 7 hours.

Also, second guessing a decision concerning Apple should be based on the company
and not on personal ignorance of some technical issue.

[Milestones]

It all gets a bit technical...no question this is not one of my strengths.

In any case, I am now back over 58 GBs available--that's one giant leap in the other (and good) direction.  I can't even tell you why that happened.

 Can there be a delayed effect with deletions?

 

 

[mjzee]

Anything's possible.  Some advice: if you have a large music collection (and if you frequent this forum, you probably do), having only 350 GB devoted to music will probably frustrate you.  For example, I have all my music on a 4 TB external hard drive, and I only have 1.35 TB remaining.  If you're not technically savvy, you may want to look into storing your music on Apple's iCloud service.

Maintaining a digital music collection is not simple, regardless of what you might be told; you do need librarian instincts and a lot of patience.  I'm not sure any of this would be easier if you were using a Windows computer or some other software.  Over a period of years, I've gotten my collection in order and understand how to maintain it.

But even then, you're dealing with computers here.  I had a mini-crisis this week: I updated the macOS to Sonoma 14.6.1.  Not sure how it happened, but afterwards iTunes wasn't saving the CDs I ripped after the update, and I didn't realize it until a few days later.  I can't tell you why this was happening.  So this required some sleuthing on my part:

1) First, I checked the Internet to see if anyone else was having this problem.  It didn't appear that was the case.

2) Since I use iTunes to rip discs, I looked at my hard drive to see if those tracks were saved.  They were!  So the problem seemed to be that iTunes wasn't recording (keeping track of) those new discs.  iTunes acts as a specialized Finder - it shows your music files (tracks and albums) in a usable, coherent way.  But if it's not aware of those tracks, it won't show them.  The screw-up here seemed to be that it should have known of these tracks but didn't.

3) So what to do?  First, I wanted to make sure the problem was over, so I ripped a new CD.  iTunes retained the info, both that night and the following morning.  So far, so good.

4) So how do I reconstruct which tracks iTunes didn't record?  I opened a Finder window and, in the search field, typed "Saved 8/9/24."  It showed me all the files saved on that day.  I saw which ones were music, and dragged them into iTunes.  iTunes now had a record of them.  I repeated the process for "Saved 8/10/24," etc.  I'm pretty sure I got everything.

Did I like having to go through all that?  No; it just comes with the territory.  And I don't know why it happened, so I'm still keeping an eye out to make sure it's continuing to work correctly.  I don't like surprises.

[rostasi]

So that was an actual Apple problem - having to do with updates,
but updates are such a pain anymore anyway (ask people who own
SONOS speakers!)

[Milestones]

Mjzee,

It sounds like we had pretty much the same problem with the Sonoma upgrade. I seemed to have all of my tracks, but I had to use Finder to play them and bring them back into the collection. Then it's also a matter of deleting those tracks that would not play--which is most of the library.  I think it's not readily obvious (in Finder) which tracks are on the main HD and which on external; so perhaps some of the problem is due to doubled tracks.

 

 

[mjzee]

Re the Sonoma upgrade: Maybe so.  My guess is that iTunes wasn't updating the "Music Library" file (which keeps track of where all your music is on all your drives); I'm glad they realized it was happening and fixed it.

You can have music files in multiple locations and on multiple drives, and iTunes should keep track of it all - right-click any song in iTunes and select Get Info, then in the window that pops up, go to the File tab, and you'll see the location of that song on your hard drive.  If a song won't play, perhaps it's in a file format incompatible with iTunes.

[kh1958]

I had a similar problem this week. I was ripping  a CD to iTunes and it refused to do so. Then I noticed that my entire music library was gone.

However, I tried a restart and everything went back to normal--my library reappeared and I could rip CDs.

[Milestones]

I am getting such weird fluctuations.  When I checked this morning I was up over 12 more GBs--I was above 71.  Nothing would account for that change.  A couple of hours later it slipped back down to 59.

[JSngry]

Do you have some kind of a virtual/swap drive?

[mjzee]

18 hours ago, rostasi said:

So that was an actual Apple problem - having to do with updates,
but updates are such a pain anymore anyway (ask people who own
SONOS speakers!)

I did a news search at the time and couldn't find anything on it.  Is there a web site or chat group you frequent where users report things like this?

[rostasi]

20 minutes ago, mjzee said:

I did a news search at the time and couldn't find anything on it.  Is there a web site or chat group you frequent where users report things like this?

Here

[mjzee]

Thanks.  I probably saw these while researching, but saw they were from January or last fall.  I didn't have this problem then; funny that it's resurrected now (at least for me).

[rostasi]

Happy that I didn't come across that problem (or update).
I'm in El Capitan anyway. Haven't updated in about 6 years.

[JSngry]

If the total capacity continues to fluctuate, I'd look to see if there was a virtual/swap drive in use. If files are constantly being moved around (including deletion), the system might be moving them there for a bit and then releasing them.  OVERSIMPLIFIED - That's really why they exist, to alleviate memory congestion.