Itunes wiped!

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Level 1

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Itunes wiped!

I downloaded the update for Itunes and Safari and when I brought up itunes anything not downloaded from the Itunes store had been deleted. It's not thousands of songs but 90% of my itunes had gone! Please tell me how I can get it back!
It showed all the albums and artists but when i clicked on them to play the songs it said "Itunes cannot find this file" or something like that.

Message was edited by: Ninjamoose

Windows Vista

Posted on Jun 14, 2009 2:57 AM

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Answer 1

polydorus

Level 6

11,967 points

Jun 14, 2009 6:26 AM in response to Ninjamoose

You get exclamation marks or dead tracks because iTunes can’t find the file. This can happen for a number of reasons:
The song file or a folder in its path was renamed
The song file or the folder it is in has been moved
The song file has been deleted
The device containing the song files e.g. external drive is not accessible or the drive letter has changed.

External drives are a common problem, drive letter changes and starting tunes with the drive unplugged.

SO did anything change and are all your tracks in the iTunes Music folder as set in Preferences>>Advanced?

If you can't work out what happened, you can use iTunes Library.xml to see where iTunes thinks the tracks are located. That could give you a clue what is going on.

To do this, you need to have file extensions visible so you can identify iTunes Library.xml in your iTune folder. (Tools>>Folder options>>File types in Windows explorer)

You can open this file with WordPad. Use Find to search for lines containing Location. These will contain the paths to music files. Note that the space character is replaced by %20.

Find a few problem tracks and see what the path says, does that help.

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