Itunes will not find my external hard drive and music on it

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dinky1969uk Author

Level 1

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Itunes will not find my external hard drive and music on it

I have downloaded itunes onto new laptop that has windows vista all the music is stored on an external hard drive. When i plug in the hard drive it no longer finds automatically the music file and runs it as it did on my old pc with windows xp. I have changed the location to find the music in itunes but no luck. If i go into my computer and look at the external hard drive and click on any song it then opens itunes and plays it! Help please

dell, Windows Vista, inspiron

Posted on Jul 4, 2009 8:19 AM

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Answer 1

polydorus

Level 6

11,967 points

Jul 4, 2009 8:29 AM in response to dinky1969uk

Setting the location of you iTunes music folder only tells iTunes where to put purchases and ripped track in the future. It does not tell iTunes to look for tracks there.

If you had a library database on the external drive, you need to connect to it by double clicking on the iTunes Library file (iTunes Library.itl).

If you don't, can your retrieve the iTunes folder from your old PC?

Otherwise you will have to add your music folder to iTunes using File>>Add folder to library....

This will add your tracks, but you will not have any of the counts, ratings and playlists as these are stored in iTunes Library.itl.

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Answer 2

dinky1969uk Author

Level 1

0 points

Jul 4, 2009 8:43 AM in response to polydorus

Thanks for that have tried what you said but i dont seem to have an itunes.itl file, and when i double click on my itunes files it just opens up this list of music.

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Answer 3

polydorus

Level 6

11,967 points

Jul 4, 2009 11:18 AM in response to dinky1969uk

When you say "when i double click on my itunes files it just opens up this list of music." it doesn't mean anything to me. You need to explain clearly, remember I only know what you tell me.

I need to understand how you have things set up and if you had you iTunes library database on the external drive or the c: drive. That is the iTunes folder containing iTunes library.itl.

What do you see when you open iTunes on the new PC, are your music files there. If not, every time you play a track it gets added to itUnes so you should at least have some files in your library.

What problem are you trying to solve? Is just getting the tracks into your iTunes library, or are you also concerned about ratings, count and playlists from the old PC. If so do you still have access to the old PC?

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