(Ir)religiosity

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iTunes problems

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I need help.  

Because I have an old school notebook, I have to keep all my music on an external hard drive to conserve space.  It makes things a little inconvenient, but I manage.  About 6 months ago my drive crashed and a lost all my music among other things.  So I bought another drive, wiped my iTunes and started the long process of recovering everything.

As of yesterday I had 85.59 GB of music (that’s around 15,000 songs or 88.1 days) and 13.52 GB of podcasts (604 tracks or 15.5 days).  Not quite back to where I was, but I’m getting there.

Anyway, here’s the problem.  Since my drive crashed and I’ve been recovering everything my iTunes has been acting a little weird.  Every now and then I’ll run across some music, music that I know I’ve recovered but music that iTunes can’t seem to “find.”  And when I come across the files I get the dreaded gray exclamation mark just to the left of the track title.  It looks like this:

Then I’ll double-click the track in question just to make sure and I get this message:

And then I’ll click “Yes” and go find the actual file on my external drive.

And what do you know, there is file right where it should be and right where it has been since I copied it back into iTunes.  But for some reason iTunes can’t find it.  So I select the track and click “choose.”  Done!  

The only thing is I have this problem with a lot of my music.  A whole lot of my music.  Just skimming through I’d estimate that around 1/3 of my iTunes library is “unfindable” like this.  

That makes for a lot of find and clicking.  Too much.  Yesterday I thought I’d go through my whole library and manually fix all this.  I spent around 3 hours and didn’t even get completely through the letter “A” in the artists section.

I’ve thought about completely wiping iTunes again and starting from scratch, but that takes some time as well, not to mention the fact that I’d lose most of my ID3 tags, my podcast information, my playlists, and other information (like play count most played etc.).

So here’s my question: is there a way to refresh my iTunes all at once without 1) having to completely wipe it and start back at square one or 2) having to manually find each track that iTunes can’t find and re-selecting it myself?

Any suggestions?

Written by Blake Huggins

May 15th, 2008 at 7:30 am

Posted in Uncategorized

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  • Philip Brooks

    Man 85 gb,man im jealous and not afraid to admit that. im probably up to 50gb between 2 computers.

    Have you checked your preferences under the advanced tab i am wondering if didnt default back to something like this since you had some work done recently:

    C:\Documents and Settings\philip a brooks\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music

    you just may may need to change your path direction because i bet anything its searching your internal hard drive first.

    I have had some problems as well with playing on shuffle and it either wont start another song or it wont change album artwork when the song changes it always seems to be one or the other. A lot of clicking for me as well but all my stuff is playing fine as of now.

    Let me know if this helped or not. But thats the very first thought that comes to mind.

    Phil

  • http://www.blakehuggins.com blake

    @phil. thanks for the advice. i thought about that and i was for sure that was the problem, but when i checked it everything was setup correctly which is really puzzling.

  • Tim

    I have the same thing. Hard drive crashed, iTunes library was backed up to external drive (phew), readdressed library path, worked OK…then I got my replacement drive, consolidated the library to the new hard drive…and iTunes can’t find half of it. Sometimes – usually in fact – two adjacent files in the same folder will come up as one OK, one with the little grey exlamation mark. All the files are actually present, in the folders where iTunes put them.

    Furthermore, If I manually locate them (I’ve tried one or two, the lot would take about a week) and then have to consolidate the library for whatever reason it makes a duplicate copy which it stores in the same folder.

    This is on a Windows machine so it’s an iTunes not a Mac issue.