restoring itunes from external hard drive

Question

Level 1

0 points

restoring itunes from external hard drive

-I used WD backup program to store itunes on external hard drive
-hard drive on mac pro crashed, replaced hard drive
-trying to restore itunes songsa from external drive and when I copied songs from external hard drive to new internal hard drive which has itunes program, only song titles appear and track number for songs I ripped from CDs. All info is present for songs I purchased from itunes (why is there a difference in the way these two are restored???)

-Can I restore itunes from external drive so that artist and album are associated with each song title I ripped from CDs?

Much appreciate all assistance. Thanks.

mac pro, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Sep 16, 2009 8:07 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

411,265 points

Sep 16, 2009 8:33 AM in response to Mark31

Music information is often stored with files as tags, or text attached to the music part of the file. Some file types support tags, others don't. What is the format of the files? If itunes can't find tags it will instead use the file name to label the track, which it apparently has done in this case. It is possible the backup files do not have tags. iTunes stores information about a track in its own library too. When your drive failed the library was lost, the files do not have tags with that information so the information is lost.

Usually track identity will be present in both the iTunes library and tags with the file, but somehow this didn't happen in your case. How did you rip the CD tracks in the first place?

Reply

Answer 2

Mark31 Author

Level 1

0 points

Sep 16, 2009 11:02 AM in response to Limnos

I ripped them as WAV files. Maybe that's why the itunes purchased songs have artist/album intact while my WAV files just have song title and track number?

If I can't recover the artist/titles, what should I do this time to make sure I have all info on external drive, in case I have to restore them on itunes again?

This makes the second time I've lost my itunes songs. I'm really frustrated...

Thanks for replying and offering your assistance Limnos.

Reply

Answer 3

Limnos

Level 10

411,265 points

Sep 16, 2009 1:32 PM in response to Mark31

I know MP3 and AAC save tag data, and I believe AIFF does as well (if you want to keep them in full-quality but space-greedy format). I don't think WAV supports tagging which is why they were lost. Read:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9558241&#9558241

This time make sure you have a complete backup of your itunes folder (which, in fact you may still have). That way you can recover your complete library and everything intact (as long as you keep your backups up to date).

Here is a related topic

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9267109&#9267109

Reply