Q: iTunes 11.4 forgetting file locations
Hello all.
I'm a little perplexed on this one so I thought I'd turn to expertise in this forum. I recently upgraded to iTunes 11.4 (also had the tethering issue in the upgrade but seem to have fixed that) and also recently moved my library to a new external hard drive (from an old external hard drive). Now what's baffling is that every time I open iTunes, iTunes seems to forget the locations of 6-15 songs. When I manually locate them, thru the iTunes locate dialog, it finds all the songs it has an issue with but for some reason this keeps occurring. It's a nuisance more than anything because to find 6-15 songs with the stupid exclamation point (which by the way, it would be most helpful to be able to SORT the library by that exclamation point) I have to scroll thru my library of 35K+ tracks... It's getting a little old....
Anyhow, running iTunes 11.4 on a USB connected external. I used iTunes Consolidate option to move the library and the location of the library is correct in preferences. Also have Keep Folder Organized and Copy To checked in preferences. This is running on a 08 Macbook running 10.7.5. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Posted on Sep 13, 2014 7:25 AM
I agree with Limnos on this one and your use of exFAT is the cause of your problem. It's likely to be down to the fact that non-alphanumeric characters used in the titles of your music tracks are handled differently by the two different filesystems. Look out for track and album names (which are translated into file- and folder-names, respectively) that have non-alphanumeric characters in them. An album called, say, "Greatest Hits: Volume 2" has to be stored as a folder called "Greatest Hits_ Volume 2" because the colon character has a special meaning within the HFS+ filesystem. Similarly, names that include quotation marks, slashes, asterisks or question marks have to be translated. The translation will be done assuming that the underlying filesystem format is HFS+ but one of the translations may result in a filename that is illegal on an exFAT volume. It will be something pretty obscure, but then again there are song titles and album names out there that contain some pretty obscure characters. I'm not sure of the specifications but it's possible that HFS+ can cope with longer path names or folder names than exFAT, so look out for very long track names or album names - some classical CDs can result is very long pathnames, for example. I strongly believe these are the issues that affect people who experience problems when they keep their iTunes media on NAS devices. The simple solution is to rename the affected tracks. A more sophisticated solution might be to store the media within a sparse image.
Posted on Sep 15, 2014 9:00 AM