Q: iTunes 12 can't locate my music

Sorry but the first  link like its broken.  Do you have another?

"The page you tried was not found. You may have used an outdated link or may have typed the address (URL) incorrectly."

Thanks I followed your note and got a sizeable proportion of my music back.  There were still about 450 songs that were listed but not found, mainly in compilation albums and it took a lot of hunting to locate them.  There were also a considerable number of tracks and albums I've downloaded in the last two years which were not listed in iTunes but oddly were sitting in the iTunes media/music folder with everything else.  After twenty four hours of looking at what I've bought and then looking for it in the music folder and copying it to iTunes again it looks like most things are back.

Can you remind me what boxes I should tick in Preferences to make sure everything I put in iTunes automatically gets put into the right media  folder?  I've done it before but it look like after upgrades I've lost my settings.

Also,  I've lost a lot of my recent playlists - can you tell me where I can reload them?

Thanks a lot, I'll certainly be following your back-up and split location advice.

Thanks for that but I mistakenly synced my iPod and its lost the missing stuff.  I'll start again from scratch on the missing playlists!

I'm still missing a lot of tracks that are in the ITunesmedia/music folder but not showing in iTunes.  I've started to look for them and drag and drop them into iTunes but noticed that they are being copied in another folder ITunesmedia/music/music.  Have I done something wrong in the Preferences?

I've checked Keep and Copy as you suggested and I've set my iTunes Media location as iTunesmedia\music.  I've got a feeling I should have set it is as iTunesmedia without the last subfolder.   is their any way of correcting this?  I also had clicked on reorganise files under Library in the file menu!

All sorted now, thanks a lot.  After I edited the folder in Preferences as you suggested everything then went into the music sub folder.  I dragged and dropped everything in the folder into iTunes and it picked up all the unlisted tracks without duplicating those which were already present, picking up over 1000 which were unlisted.

I found my old playlists on my Sonos system and have spent an enjoyable afternoon reconstructing them, knowing that I've found all my music.  Thanks again.  Now to sort out the back-up.

Just one final point, now that I've got everything the way I want it, how do I create a new library file to save me future grief?

Thanks again.

Hallix

Sorry to labour the point but ituneslibrary.itl in the iTunes folder isn't updating.  My last two files were corrupted and the current file was created in May 2014.

Is it supposed to update automatically and if so, what can I do to make this happen?

Thanks for your patience.

No its becoming clearer.  The folder the May 2014 file I referred to earlier was in my iTunes folder on the E;Drive where my music is.

After following your instructions this is what I found:-

the file iTunesLibrary2014-11-24.itl is in the MyMusic\iTunes\Previous iTunes Library folder on the C: drive. Although it says 24 November the properties tag shows it was created and modified earlier today.

There is also a file iTuneslibrary.itl (with no date) which is in the MyMusic\iTunes folder on the C: drive.  This was created and last modified on 24 November.

Hope this is clear to you

I'd like to make the split library portable if you can help me.

The media folder is E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media.