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. |
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| Step 2: Click "Library" That's where iTunes "sees" your music. |
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| Step 3: Select all songs Click one of the songs in your collection, and then press Ctrl + A to select your entire library. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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john
16/08/2006 08:00 AM
Your story seems like a good plan but I am running itunes six when this happened and forsome reason it just deletes the song and I do not know where it went please help me! ASAP! please
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ToddPod
25/08/2006 08:50 PM
I believe this is BAD ADVICE! If you need to tell the user to first start Itunes, then you should really have steps to show them HOW TO COPY THEIR ITUNES FOLDER TO THE NEW LOCATION. If a newbie simply follows the instructions above ( as the previous poster seems to have, unfortunately) you are simply just deleting your itunes library! Shame on you! The least you should do is link to advice on how to copy the Itunes Library to another locations whilst keeping the existing library intact. I expect better from an authority like Cnet.
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Michael Joyeux
03/01/2007 09:28 PM
Surely there must be a way of doing this without losing play counts and ratings, I've been running iTunes now for almost three years and still have all my ratings and play counts, something which I'd be loathed to get rid of and strat from stratch, in addition to Hundreds of Playlists.
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cider_boy
22/03/2007 08:17 AM
this method sucks! you loose all your playlists!! - must be a better way of doing things?
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leighjam
21/07/2007 02:21 AM
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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TK8103
30/11/2007 12:37 AM
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.
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Beebo
08/03/2008 01:27 PM
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.
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