Finding all my music

[Michael73]

This problem goes back some time, but see if you can help...

I had a MacPro '06 but it was giving me loads of problems. After weeks of trying to fix it, Apple gave me a new MP '08. In the process, the store itself did the data transfer - this was back in Feb / March.

So every once in a while, when I'm listening to iTunes, it's unable to locate a song. I haven't had a problem tracking down the song which is usually in my iTunes library. I think the problem stemmed from the fact that when I switched from a PC to a Mac I had all this music that I copied from the drive in my old PC to the "Macintosh HD" and then added the music to my iTunes library. What I later realized what that iTunes was making a copy of my music so instead of 80GB of music I now had 160GB. At that point I learned that iTunes could reference music and movies without copying them into it's library. So, I had this mix of music in my iTunes library and music that was being referenced on another drive.

In any case, I have this weird situation now where all the titles of the songs show up in my iTunes library but I have no idea how many iTunes won't be able to find. Lately, as I've been using the Genius feature, some of the songs have cropped up with a little exclamation point next to them. As I've said, I can track them down, so I don't think I've actually lost anything but I don't know why iTunes isn't finding them.

Is there anyway, to go through iTunes and actually figure out which songs are going to have an exclamation mark next to them without playing all 15,000 or 20,000 songs and then rebuild the database?

 

[spinnerlys]

I ran into this problem quite often and I took the hard approach.

I deleted every song in iTunes (the software) and just re-imported all my music into iTunes (without copying the whole content to the iTunes specified location).

Of course it means getting the artwork again (which is easy with an iTunes account for at least the most albums, not all) and the determination of the gaps has to be run again (but that shouldn't be a problem for a Mac Pro.

I think there are other ways, maybe have a look at MacUpdate for some database fixing software, or wait for the next better answer.

 

[richard.mac]

hmmm unfortunately i think youve made it very complicated. you have music copied into iTunes' library and then referenced music. this is why i copy all of my music into iTunes' library so it automatically organises it for you. then i trash the original.

you can either sift thru all the exclamation marks and re-find them or collect all your music together, start a fresh new iTunes library and import all your music again.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

There is a program that can compare your iTunes XML file and all files in your Music folder to see if anything in your Music Folder is not in your iTunes program:
iTunes Consolidator

For finding dead link songs try out Doug's Script:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=removedeadsuper
(install this script in "/Library/iTunes/Scripts)

I imagine ideally you should run the Super Remove Tracks script first and then do Consolidator.
Should help ya out

 

[spinnerlys]

Thanks for the links. No more hard deleting stuff.

 

[i.shaun]

I had a similar problem when I tried using my Maxtor 300GB portable HDD backup utility to backup iTunes.

It would first write to the old file on the HDD, then check my iTunes library on the macintosh HDD. Of course the old itunes file registers as the "newest" file, and it asks if I want to replace the old version with the new version. I stupidly clicked yes thinking "well I just added music and updated THIS library, so obviously this is the new version"


I thought the backup was one-way, and that it would only synch my current iTunes library, with a copy it makes on the HDD, but instead it wrote to the old iTunes library, and replaced my current one with an old library file.


Music I had added, started having exclamation points, and I was NOT going to manually search for each song. My iTunes library was corrupted, so what I did was:

-Copy all music out of the iTunes directory
-put all mp3s in a folder together, this helped weed out bad folders that somehow got corrupted. These folders are ghosts which refuse to delete, despite not having any files in them.
-deleted all bad folders, and emptied trash
-Dragged all music to the itunes window
-waited for iTunes to re-sort EVERYTHING all over again.
-Disabled Maxtor One Touch automated backup button - never to use it again.

-Once finished, I manually copied the new library to the portable HDD for backup. If you want something done right -- you have to do it yourself.