How to Find Deleted Songs in a YouTube Playlist

Your playlist says 240 songs. You scroll and count fewer. Somewhere in there, songs stopped playing, and nothing tells you which ones.

Short answer: compare the song count at the top of the playlist with the rows you see. A higher count usually means songs are missing. Then open the playlist on youtube.com on a desktop, click the ⋮ (three-dot) menu and choose Show unavailable videos to see where the gaps are. To check every playlist at once, and to keep the names of the songs, you need a tracker.

What counts as a deleted song

YouTube Music songs are YouTube videos. A video in your playlist can stop playing for several reasons:

• The uploader deleted it, or the channel was closed.
• It was removed after a copyright claim or a terms violation.
• The uploader made it private.
• It became unavailable for another reason.

From your side they all look alike. The row stays in the playlist, the title is gone, and the song will not play. The reasons are explained in why songs disappear from YouTube Music.

Four ways to find them

Method	Works for	What you get	Effort
Compare count and rows	One playlist	That something is missing	1 minute
Show unavailable videos	One playlist, desktop	The position of each gap	2 minutes
Compare with an old export	One playlist per export	The names, if you kept one	Manual, every time
Track your playlists	All tracked playlists	The names, saved before the song went	Set up once

Check one playlist in 2 minutes

1. Open the playlist and note the number of songs at the top.
2. Count the rows you see. A long playlist loads in chunks, so keep scrolling to the end first.
3. If the count is higher than the rows, open the same playlist on youtube.com on a desktop.
4. Click the ⋮ (three-dot) menu on the playlist header and choose Show unavailable videos.

The hidden rows now show up, usually as [Deleted video] or [Private video]. Menus move around, so look in the overflow menu or on the banner if you don't see it. Liked Music and very long playlists may not offer this option or may not show every row. The full walkthrough is in what "unavailable videos are hidden" means.

This tells you where the gaps are. It does not tell you what the songs were. YouTube removes the title with the video. To get a name back, see how to find out what song was deleted.

Why checking by hand stops working

The check above is fine once. It breaks down when:

• You have many playlists. Ten playlists means ten counts and ten reveals.
• You repeat it. The reveal is not permanent, so you do it again on every visit.
• You want the name. Once the song is deleted, the name is hard to get back.
• You want to know soon. Nothing warns you. A song that vanishes today shows up in your count the next time you happen to look.

An export from before the song went can fill in the name. It only helps if you made one in time. Songs added and lost between two exports are never recorded.

Find them across every playlist

A tracker does the same check for you on a schedule. PermaMusic reads the playlists you choose, saves each song's title, and flags the songs whose title YouTube replaced with a placeholder such as Deleted video or Private video. They land on one Deleted Songs page, with the saved name next to each blank row when one is available.

• Read-only. You connect your Google account with read-only access. PermaMusic does not change anything in your YouTube account.
• You pick the playlists. Track the ones you care about.
• A schedule. The free plan checks weekly or monthly. Paid plans add daily checks and a button to check on demand.
• An alert. PermaMusic emails you when songs are deleted, and can send a push notification too. See how to get notified when a song is deleted.

The free plan includes a first full scan and shows a limited number of recovered titles, so you can see what you have lost before you decide on more.

See it before you connect anything

The demo shows the Deleted Songs page on a made-up library, with no sign-in. Open the demo's Deleted Songs page to see what the gaps look like once they have names, or browse the whole demo library.

Recap

• A playlist count higher than its visible rows usually means songs are missing.
• Show unavailable videos on desktop YouTube shows where the gaps are, not what the songs were.
• Checking each playlist by hand does not scale, and it does not save names.
• A tracker saves the title while the song is still up, checks on a schedule and lists everything in one place.