So I was doing some fall cleaning and accidently deleted the song files for most of my iTunes. It still shows all of the songs on iTunes but they won't play. Is there any way I can fix this or am I screwed?
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Accidently Deleted iTunes library
- Thread starter TheBusDriver
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Yes, No. Damn. I do have most of it stored on my iPod and can use Senuti but won't that make duplicates of all the songs?
If you have in fact, deleted your music library (the folder that contains the actual songs) and have no backup, and you don't want to deal with duplicate entries, then I would suggest starting from scratch.
Find you iTunes folder under your Music folder.
Delete all subfolders and files.
Start iTunes and your library should be empty.
Then use Sentui to import.
Again, using this method removes everything from your library including playlists. So all you will have is what you can import from your iPod via Sentui.
You could make a backup of your iTunes.xml file before starting over. That would save your playlist's and play count info etc.
Most of the songs are from cds Well, I've found that sometimes when I used to import music it would import it twice, once to the itunes library and once to the music folder so a song that was say 120mb ended up being 240mb because it was on there HD twice. My library is around 40gbs so that adds up when you only have 120gb HD to work with. I deleted the wrong folder though, I couldn't remember which one was which and deleted it into the trash and played through some randoms in the library they still worked so I thought I was good. Hit delete the song was still playing so I really thought I was good. Then it quit and I knew I was screwed.
Unfortunately, this will confuse iTunes and the user.
If the old songs are deleted, then the info in the playlists is for deleted songs and will not work with the new songs.
So other than for informational purposes, I would not keep this file. So if I wanted to keep this file, I would move it to another location outside of the iTunes folder.
Also, when Sentui imports the songs and playlists from the iPod, the playlists will be correctly linked to the songs.
Something is not set up correctly on your computer if you are getting two copies.
I would suggest that under preferences, you check both of these:
- Keep iTunes Music folder organized.
- Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to Library.
That way when you import your music, say encoding from a CD to MP3, the song will go directly to the library instead of somewhere else on your HD.
iTunes gives you the options of importing music, and not copying it to the iTunes Folder.
Used this method to change my Music so it shows up for all users on the machine. Moved it to a public folder (with 'net sharing off) and reimported the music making sure "copy to iTunes" was turned off.
So I've got GBs of music available to all users, and a 50-70MB iTunes folder in my Home Folder.
Used this method to change my Music so it shows up for all users on the machine. Moved it to a public folder (with 'net sharing off) and reimported the music making sure "copy to iTunes" was turned off.
So I've got GBs of music available to all users, and a 50-70MB iTunes folder in my Home Folder.
Good way if you want to multiple computers on a LAN to have access.
In my case, this wouldn't work since I want to carry all of my music with me. At home, I can use the iTunes sharing feature to accomplish the same task.
This would only backup the list of songs, not the songs themselves. If you don't have the music files, the playlists would be useless, other than to remind you what you lost. If you lose the playlists but have the music files (.mp3, etc.), you can always re-import and rebuild the playlists.