iTunes Match help - unable to locate file

[macman4789]

Hi,

I've had iTunes Match for years and uploaded all my songs to the cloud. I only have a 256gb SSD drive so this was perfect as if I wanted to listen to a song it would just stream it from the iTunes servers instead of having to have my entire library downloaded on my Mac.

I recently decided to try the google music service and so needed to download my entire library. I therefore had to plug in an external drive and change the location of my iTunes library to this drive. My problem now is whenever I don't have my drive plugged in to my Mac all of my songs have the exclamation mark next to them and bring up the message 'Unable to locate file.' My question is how do I go back to how I had it before when my Mac could just stream everything from iCloud iTunes Match servers without it asking the location of my files? I don't want to have to plug in my drive every time I want to play music without the error message.

If I change the location of my library back to my Mac won't it be looking for all the files that aren't there?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Brookzy]

I recently decided to try the google music service and so needed to download my entire library.

Before I answer - this confuses me. I assume you mean that you had to transfer your songs and playlists to Google? If that's the case you didn't have to download the files, you could have just imported your .xml library file couldn't you?

Anyway, that doesn't really matter for the solution...

While the error is "unable to locate file", here's another way of looking at your error that will make it clearer why it is happening.

If the drive is unplugged and you try to play the song, iTunes will try to find the file and fails. What you want it to do is stream it instead. But the problem is that if it streams the file instead, there would then be two files: the one on your hard drive, and the streamed one on your Mac. iTunes doesn't do this. It can either 1) cache a song. It will do this when a song is available in iCloud Music Library but is not downloaded locally. Or 2) play the local copy, if there is one. It won't do both, because you would end up with duplicated data.

Because iTunes knows that you have local copies of the track you're trying to play, it will try option 2) rather than 1) and thus throws up the error.

Basically, iTunes isn't designed to be used without the constant ability to access your library files.

The solution is easy though.

If you have enough space, just move your iTunes library back onto your Mac from the external disk.

If you don't have enough space, then first connect your external disk, open iTunes, go to Songs, select all, right click, and Remove Download. The files will still be in iCloud even if you remove them locally. Then move your iTunes library back onto your Mac from the external disk. From then on tracks you listen to will cache as needed, space-efficiently.

If I change the location of my library back to my Mac won't it be looking for all the files that aren't there?

Yes it will, unless you move the whole iTunes Media folder from the external disk back to your Mac as well, which you should do and won't take too long.

 

[macman4789]

That's brilliant, thanks very much for that solution! A massive help I'll do that.

In response to your google question, I did some research and it asked me to download my entire library and then use the google music manager to upload the entire library to the google play music service.