iTunes organization problem, HELP!

[mojohanna]

So i recently realized that I had placed my itunes folder on the wrong partition of my drive which placed it outside of the partition that Time Machine covers. So I moved the folder back to my main HD and repartitioned the drive so that TM had the whole drive.

All of my music is still there, I can see it, I can play it. However, all of the tracks have an exclamation mark next to them. If I try to play it, I must manually find the song. I could fix it my manually doing each song, but at over 1100 songs, it will take me all day. I think I must have borked the data base link or something when I moved the folder.

I can't (iTunes won't) consolidate the library.

I also seem to have this 10g worth of music in at least two different places. One in my user folder and one in the main folder. I am afraid to delete either one since I am not sure which is the correct file to use.

Can anyone help to guide me in repairing this?

Thanks much.

 

[cornerdealy]

delete them all from itunes and re add them?

 

[mojohanna]

Yeah right, that is just as much work if not more, particularly seeing that over 200 of them are purchased. No dice till I figure out what to do.

 

[cornerdealy]

wait, why would that take longer? just delete them all, then choose file > add to library and pick the folder that has all your songs on them...

or am i missing something here?

 

[babyj]

Sounds like the music is in a different place than iTunes thinks it is.

Go to Preferences then Advanced then General.

Click change and navigate to the folder that has your music in it.

Click OK, then restart iTunes.

I'm not sure why you would end up with the music in two places though, unless you just copied the folder but then it should still see the music correctly in the original location.

My iTunes library is on an external drive, when I moved it there I just created an iTunes folder, then moved the database to that folder and the music to a sub folder then pointed iTunes to it (as above).

If the above doesn't fix it or you have more problems, post them here or send me a pm.

 

[mojohanna]

I think I inadvertently tossed the itunes DB file that was attached to my music folder. The only way I have found to get this back to normal is to drop the music files into a newly created itunes folder and double click (play) each song. That seems to place it back into the database. It also creates a duplicate, but those are easily parsed and deleted. It will just take some time to go thru the folder and all of the music.

 

[Consultant]

I think I inadvertently tossed the itunes DB file that was attached to my music folder. The only way I have found to get this back to normal is to drop the music files into a newly created itunes folder and double click (play) each song. That seems to place it back into the database. It also creates a duplicate, but those are easily parsed and deleted. It will just take some time to go thru the folder and all of the music.

To avoid duplicate: go to Preferences / Advanced / General
and uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to Library"

You probably have to recheck it when you are done. Actually why didn't you drop the whole music folder into iTunes? You don't have to add song by song.

 

[Consultant]

For Future Reference

What you should have done is

* Close iTunes
* Copy folder to new location, trash the original folder
* Open iTunes, DO NOT attempt to play any song.
* Go to iTunes Preferences / Advanced/ General, and set it to new location.
* Close iTunes, and reopen iTunes.

iTunes should read the music at the new location now. To see whether it's pointing to the new location, click a song, on a Mac, use keyboard [Command-R], that will show the file that song is referenced to. Then [Command-Click] on the centered folder (same height as the red, yellow, green buttons) to show location.

 

[mojohanna]

To avoid duplicate: go to Preferences / Advanced / General
and uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to Library"

You probably have to recheck it when you are done. Actually why didn't you drop the whole music folder into iTunes? You don't have to add song by song.

I tried dropping the folder in, but it still wouldn't recognize the songs dropped in there.