iTunes can't find my music!!!

[rympy]

About two weeks ago i purchased and exteral drive to store my expanding iTunes library. I followed the apple instructions on how to move itunes library (iTunes prefs, change location of library, consolidate, etc..) and it sucessfully copied all of my music to the external. i moved the old iTunes library to the trash but didn't empty the trash (i was nervous )

yesterday i installed the OS10.4 upgrade on the computer (not the external?? not sure about that one), and I took my old library out of the trash to burn it to dvd as a backup. After I burned a couple dvds (artists that begin with As, Bs, Cs) I put those files in the trash and emptied it immediately. I opened iTunes to listen to some music, but all the artists that begin with A, b, and C could not be found by itunes. I checked iTunes prefs and saw that my library was still (supposed to be) located on my external.. I then put all of my old library in the trash and emptied it. Re-opend iTunes and made sure it looks for the library on my external. It does. but when i select a song to play I see "the song could not be found, would you like to locate it" so I locate it on my external, and it plays fine. Interestingly, after I locate the file, itunes puts a copy of it in my users:music:itunes:itunes music folder. All the ratings and playlists show up fine in iTunes, but every song has an exclamation mark beside it.
I am not prepared to locate 8000 songs and I don't want the copy on my computer's hard drive.

What can i do to remedy this. The whole point of all this is to maintain my playlists and ratings, and I don't want to lose them.
(btw: I didn't delete the itunes library files in my users:music:Itunes folder and there are also files in a folder called 'previous itunes libraries' in my user:music:itunes that has two more library files)

how can I keep my files in the external and get iTunes to recognise them while maintaining all my playlists??

THANKS!
PowerBook 1.25GHz 80GB 1.25GB RAM
200GB Samsung external

 

[Linkjeniero]

What I think happens here is that even though iTunes looks for its folder in your external drive, the library itself thinks the song is in your home folder. If I'm right, there are two solutions:
- deleting the library file and adding all the songs again. Painful, but the cleanest solution
- making a soft link from your external to the PB hard drive. Basically, making iTunes think it's using the default folder, when in fact is the external disk. Biggest problem with this is that you won't be able to keep music for iTunes in the PB disk, unless you uncheck the "copy songs to the iTunes Music Folder" option in iTunes.

EDIT: I just checked the library file and as I thought, it has the full links to the hard drive. I also noticed that you don't want to have the music in your hard drive, so you may as well go with my second choice. To do this: let's assume your account name is pete, your external name is lacie, and you're keeping the copy of the iTunes Music folder in the hard drive, in the mail folder.

Change the preferences in iTunes to look for its folder on the default path (/Users/pete/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music), and then close it

Delete the iTunes Music folder from your hard drive

Open terminal

Go to the iTunes folder (the one that contains the iTunes Music folder and the library file), with the command:
cd /Users/pete/Music/iTunes

write the following:
ln -s "/Volumes/lacie/iTunes Music" "iTunes Music"

That ough to do it; tell me how it goes

 

[rympy]

Hey thanks for the info!

I just checked my library file and it shows that the location of my songs is in the trash bin... not the iTunes Music Folder. What happened?
Something must have changed when I did the move the first time because it now shows the trashbin locations.
I wonder if i copy all of my music back to the PB iTunes music folder and then redo the process. would that work too?

 

[Linkjeniero]

Hey thanks for the info!

I just checked my library file and it shows that the location of my songs is in the trash bin... not the iTunes Music Folder. What happened?
Something must have changed when I did the move the first time because it now shows the trashbin locations.
I wonder if i copy all of my music back to the PB iTunes music folder and then redo the process. would that work too?

Mmm, I don't know... it's weird that it modified the locations. Did you play the songs from within the trash bin or something? The directions I gave you will work only if the library is looking for the files in the default path

 

[rympy]

I found a labourous sol'n. I think. My guess is something happened during the upgrade from 10.3.9 - 10.4 since i was working with the old library and playing on the new one at that time. iTunes was playing music out of the trashbin at somepoint before the upgrade too.

So i copied all of my music back into the default directory and then put that in the trash bin. MOST of my songs were instantly found again. I then pulled the folder out of the trashcan and onto my desktop. and iTunes is working pretty well. There is a strange pattern (or lack of) in the songs that still can't be found. They are mostly 4 star songs, played fairly recently, and I beleive were very recently on my iPod mini..peculiar.

So now i will go through the remaining songs not found manually (maybe a couple hundred still , but it should work.
Then i guess i will need to redo the process of moving my library to my external and empty the trashbin immediately this time...

[sigh]~

 

[cube]

Just put the itunes music directory whenever you want, remove the garbage itunes library file and import the directory. All the music in that directory will be added to the
new library file.

You lose the play counts and date added info.