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dukebound85

macrumors Core
Original poster
Jul 17, 2005
19,218
4,342
5045 feet above sea level
Hi all, my library has some issues in that it does not register all of my songs in itunes

I know this as when I copied my entire folder to my macbook (minus the library and .xml files) I have a few hundred more songs than I do on my desktop

However, since I did not have the .xml and library folder carry over, I lost all my playcounts, playlists, dates, etc that I like to have.

Is there any way I can reimport my entire library and only add the songs that are not "seen" by itunes at the moment? FWIW, I have thousands of song files and I do not want to manually search for which ones show up in my mb library but not my desktops

Thanks
 
I have found that iTunes doesn't recognize some files, even though they may be the right file type. This is possibly due to corruption in the file. When that happens, you can, for example, convert them from mp3 to mp3 (essentially recreating them) with something like Max. Then you should be able to import them to iTunes. This can be done in batch mode, but, as you said, identifying them would be a pain.

Of course, if you identify them, you can fix them and then re-import your entire music folder. iTunes will only import songs not already in your library. In other words, it won't create dupes if you import the same songs again.
 
So I could accomplish this by

1) Copying my entire itunes library
2) re-importing the library

It won't create duplicates correct?
Correct.. You can test it by re-importing one album you already have in your library, then see if duplicates anything. It won't.
 
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