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REPAIR broken links in iTunes.....anyone????

B

Black Diesel

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 15, 2011
261
113
I've google'd this to death but I've yet to find a solution....

I have approx 20K songs in iTunes 10.5.1 and my songs are located on an external hard drive. For some reason several thousand songs now have the infamous exclamation mark next to them but I've confirmed they are still in my library on the external HD. Does anyone know how to fix this without manually fixing 3000 links one at a time?

edit: I don't want to get rid of the songs with exclamations, but just repair them so iTunes will play them.

Thanks in advance.
 
DewGuy1999 said:
Did you try showing iTunes the location of the music on the external drive via Preferences, Advanced, iTunes Media folder location?
Click to expand...

I will take a look at this but iTunes already knows the location of the songs because it's only a few thousand out of 20K that have exclamation marks. When I click on a song with an exclamation mark it gives me the message "cannot find song do you want to locate it" and I can just browse to the library and find the song exactly where it should be. For some reason many of these links got broken and I'm guessing it has to do with upgrading to newer versions of itunes.
 
Black Diesel said:
I've google'd this to death but I've yet to find a solution....

I have approx 20K songs in iTunes 10.5.1 and my songs are located on an external hard drive. For some reason several thousand songs now have the infamous exclamation mark next to them but I've confirmed they are still in my library on the external HD. Does anyone know how to fix this without manually fixing 3000 links one at a time?

edit: I don't want to get rid of the songs with exclamations, but just repair them so iTunes will play them.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
  1. Shut down iTunes.
  2. Mount your external drive.
  3. Launch iTunes.
If you haven't moved any files, that should work. You have to have your external drive mounted before launching iTunes, or it can't find your music.

You can also try these scripts from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes, which is a great resource for managing your iTunes tags and files.
 
Last edited:
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