Lost: Finding the missing in iTunes

By Eliot Van Buskirk, CNET.com on 23 June 2006

If you reorganise the music on your hard drive -- say, by moving it onto an external hard drive, switching up your folders, or renaming your drives -- Apple's otherwise helpful iTunes software will lose sight of your tracks and will never play them again.

That is, unless you follow the steps in this tutorial. One caveat: This tutorial will call for you to erase all your song ratings and playcounts. However, your songs themselves won't be erased.

Required attention span:
30 minutes or more depending on the size of your digital music collection.

Here're what you'll need:

  • iTunes
  • Music that iTunes can't find
Step 1: Start iTunes
This should go without saying, but you never know.
Start iTunes now.

Click to enlarge.

Step 2: Click "Library"
That's where iTunes "sees" your music.

Click to enlarge.

Step 3: Select all songs
Click one of the songs in your collection, and then press
Ctrl + A to select your entire library.

Click to enlarge.

Step 4: Clear songs
Right-click anywhere in the selected songs area, and choose Clear from the popup menu.

Although it looks like iTunes is about to delete all your music, it really isn't. See the Step 6 for more on that.

Click to enlarge.

Step 5: Big decision time
As mentioned above, following the steps in this tutorial will remove all your song ratings and playcounts. If you don't know what those are, then you don't need to worry about them.

If you do know what they are, this is your last chance to decide whether you want to discard them. I say it's worth it, because you'll keep all your music and re-rating songs is less of a pain than helping iTunes find every song you've moved around on your computer.

Click to enlarge.

Step 6: Do not recycle your music
iTunes might ask you if you want to send music in your iTunes folder to the recycle bin. Do not select this option, unless you're trying to trash your whole digital music collection.

If you do select it by mistake, try to close down iTunes before it completes its ominous task, or else just grab your music from the recycle bin after iTunes finishes putting it there.

Click to enlarge.

Step 7: Add your music back into iTunes
Now point iTunes toward the folder(s) that contain(s) your music. Default to the highest-level folder, since iTunes will grab songs from subfolders as well. Rinse and repeat until you've imported all your music into iTunes.

Now you won't have those annoying exclamation points telling you to help iTunes locate songs. If you listen on random mode, you're likely to hear songs you haven't heard in a while because iTunes has been skipping them. Now it's all good.

Topics: itunes, missing songs, music software, itune, song, music, enlarge, step

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Comments (14)

  • 1slipperyfish commented on 08/08/2009 20:46 Report abuse

    thanks for this i use vista and sent all of my library to the recycle bin and imported back for itunes folder, no playlists but all songs back again!!!

  • Bill2kjr commented on 20/07/2009 10:25 Report abuse

    Actually, it's quite easy to get iTunes to find all of your songs on a new Vista computer. These instructions assume you moved your iTunes Folder (library) to your new Vista computer.

    On your old iTunes, right click on a song and select "Get info" and check the path to your songs. For example, mine was C:/Documents and Settings/MyName/Desktop/My Tunes.

    When you move your songs onto your new computer, recreate that exact file path on the C: Drive. NOTE: Vista will automatically move a folder named "Documents and Settings" to "Users". Don't worry about this, it will still work. In the "Users" folder, I created a folder called "MyName", then one inside that called "Desktop" and then moved my folder of music (called "My Tunes) into that folder (recreating the path that iTunes is looking for).

    When I reopened iTunes, the exclamation points were gone and my problem was solved!

  • ifgone commented on 23/05/2009 07:45 Report abuse

    i agree! all my music was deleted...

  • kloi commented on 23/05/2009 07:43 Report abuse

    it didn't work. all my stuff was deleted...

  • yayaya commented on 03/11/2008 13:06 Report abuse

    Regarding the advice of setting BPM to 999, that's lousy, because the next time you sync your iPod, iTunes will sync EVERY song in your library.

    Better to use a program like iTunes Library Updater.

  • ctodd commented on 10/10/2008 00:50 Report abuse

    okay, this works for me, but, weirdly enough, it's ending before the entire contents of the folder are added to the library. I can see all the folders under the "My Music" folder, but I"m only getting folders A-C into the library. No message, no nothing, it just seems to randomly stop. Any thoughts?

  • Bill commented on 15/09/2008 05:42 Report abuse

    This is an old article, but I'd hardly say losing your ratings is "worth it." Can you imagine re-rating over 30,000 tracks?

  • Beebo commented on 08/03/2008 13:27 Report abuse

    If you have some computer knowledge about where your files are stored, and you have (or should I say 'had') a large music library this is the best way to restore. You do lose your playlists, play counts and ratings, but hey, you also lose the exclamation points.

  • TK8103 commented on 30/11/2007 00:37 Report abuse

    This advice worked great for me. I had spent 3 hours manually relocating songs, and I was missing 7000. I tried the method above, and was done in less than an hour.

  • leighjam commented on 21/07/2007 02:21 Report abuse

    There is a better way Highlight all the songs, get song info, then set the BPM (or another non critical field) to something wacky like 999, then click ok and just WAIT...
    Once you're done just sort by BPM (or the other field) and look for everything that is NOT 999 and delete. iTunes can't update info on files that don't exist.

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