No it doesn't. Please don't make sh*t up. Its bad enough that this hint got run to begin with.

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Pell

whiz, you're right, I made it all up. Negative Nancy, always on the job, keeping people honest! Good work, sleuth.

Well, he's right. ITunes doesn't delete songs that can't be found (have a ! by them) from an i-whatever during autosync. To get them deleted, you have to synchronize with an empty library, which is very different from a ! filled library.

Unfortunately, he is. I just hate it when d-bags are right, it makes them into bigger d-bags. The problem wasn't that my drive wasn't attached, it was that I synced it with a computer that didn't have my library on it. Anyway, I do not use autosync for this, and other reasons (see leamanc's post).