nude Itunes music transfer

[budaapple]

😀 There that got your attention! I have an ipod that has all my tunes on it and I recently bought a new PB and when I transferred all my music off the xternal HD some of them did not make it and when I click on them a get the message "the original file does not exist would I like to find it" I have transferred music between computers before and used firewire but never from an xternal hd. What did I do wrong. How can I erase the library from the computer and use the ipods contents to refill it and then go from there. I know there is software that can do this just don't know where to find it and how to do it. This music is my life so please someone help!🙂
Thank You!

 

[Thomas Harte]

It sounds like for some reason or another your old music library had symbolic links in it - they look like normal files on the hard disk but actually just tell the OS to look somewhere else for that file. Use of them is entirely transparent to applications, so iTunes would not have been able to tell. Possibly you had links pointing either to files you didn't copy across or to files that were on your main drive? Symbolic links look different in the Finder if that'll help you identify them. Otherwise, I guess there could have been some sort of drive or copy error.

Anyway, I recently had to restore my entire music collection from my iPod, and I used iPodDisk which is free and worked perfectly with my new video iPod, so presumably supports the whole range. You just plug your iPod in so that it becomes visible in iTunes in the normal way, then launch iPodDisk and you get Finder access to all the music on your iPod. So you can copy it to your hard disk and then add it all back into iTunes (I just used File->Add to Library... so that I didn't have to select each file individually).

Besides making my train journeys more enjoyable, knowing that my iPod is also a backup of all my music makes it an even better product!