iTunes help

[diamond3]

Okay, this is a bit of a problem for me. I can solve it one way, but its my guess that there is a faster way. Here is what happened:

On my iMac, somehow someone created duplicate tracks that were linked to the exact same file. ie. It shows 2 of the same songs that are actually the same file, not different ones. So, I didn't know this was possible to begin with and so when I went through to clean up duplicates I saw A LOT of them. Some of them were right but others I could tell shouldn't be there. So I went through and started deleting some of them. one thousand or so I deleted of the duplicates. Then when I decided to take a break from doing that, I went to listen to some music in the normal view mode and thats when I noticed some of them were missing. All the ones that I had deleted. So, I understand that those songs are now completely off my iMac, however I have most of them on my windows computer.

What is the best way of getting the music of my upstairs onto my iMac?

To answer my own question, here is my initial thought. Go through my PC and select the songs I need and put them on the iMac. The problem is that this will take an hour or more to do since I will be going through thousands of songs one by one to see which link is broken. How would you all go about solving this problem? Oh yeah, don't worry, I am going to do a backup of all the music as soon as everything is neatly organized and back in order on my iMac. This will take me some time and dvd's since I have almost 30gb of just music.

 

[mad jew]

This sounds like a bit of a mess. Were the PC and Mac libraries identical? If so, transfer the library via the network or some other medium by copying across the entire iTunes folder and replacing it on the Mac. Is that what you're after?

 

[diamond3]

Humm. I will give an example, but with not as many songs.

My iMac:
Coldplay - partial songs missing from there 3 albums
Linkin Park - same thing, missing some of the songs on the album
Matchbox 20 - all there

PC - it has all of the coldplay, linkin park, but it doesn't have matchbox 20. Most of the songs are on my pc, but not all of them so I can't really just transfer the whole thing down and replace the library.

I was wondering what would happen if I was on my iMac, connected to my pc and found the music folder and then import it (with the copy songs option selected). Now, on the songs (on my iMac) that don't have the original file anymore, when I reimport the music will the songs with the missing link just connect back with the new ones?

 

[mad jew]

That'll work except I reckon the newly imported tracks will make a new link in iTunes, still leaving you with grey exclamation marks for the original links to the songs. Does that make sense? Nevertheless, you'll still be better off than before.

 

[diamond3]

yeah that does make sense. I still don't understand how I could get two identical songs that show up in iTunes and have them linked to the same file. I don't even know a way to do that. And the other thing was that it was set to make additional copies if you import a song. Oh well. It's going to take me a while. Is there anyway of getting all the exclamation marks to show up at once without going through and playing each song and finding out which one it will skip? And then maybe some smart list would be nice but I don't think there would be a way to do that.

 

[mad jew]

If you have enough free space (at least as much space as your iTunes library takes up), then I'd import all the songs you need from the other computer and then consolidate the library to a new location via the iTunes Preferences. This should then copy across all the track iTunes can find to the new location, meaning you can eliminate the old library and hopefully not have any unlinked tracks. You may still have a few double ups but they can be remedied via the View menu.

Alternatively, try rebuilding your iTunes library.