Making iTunes library find missing tracks in multiple, not one by one

Hi Turingtest2,

I am currently in iTunes **** - I have just about 2TB of music on an external drive - as of Saturday I added 17 albums - no problem. Subsequently all of the my older music before that day is now unplayable with exclamations marks on it - if yuo are around I could really, REALLY do with your help - having gone through this thread you seem to be the MAN for these issues ...

Let me know if you can help a brother out.

Kind Regards,

JR

Hiya,

Windows or OS X?

Where is the media folder as shown under iTunes|Edit > Preferences > Advanced?

What is the full path to one of the broken tracks?

Where does iTunes think it should be according to Get Info > File tab?

tt2

Windows 10 Pro

H:forward slash iTunes

file://localhost/G:/WD Smartware.swstor/JUSTIN-PC/Volume.ecc77cdc.0940.11e0.a35d.001bfbccafa/iTunes Music/Hoyt Axton/The A&M Years 73-76 CD1/1-01 Sweet Misery.mp3

H:forward slash iTunes forward slash Hoyt Axton forward slash The A&M Years 73-76 CD1 forward slash 1-01 Sweet Misery.mp3

Windows 10 Pro

H:\iTunes

file://localhost/G:/WD Smartware.swstor/JUSTIN-PC/Volume.ecc77cdc.0940.11e0.a35d.001bfbccafa/iTunes Music/Hoyt Axton/The A&M Years 73-76 CD1/1-01 Sweet Misery.mp3

H:\iTunes\Hoyt Axton\The A&M Years 73-76 CD1\1-01 Sweet Misery.mp3

Thanks my friend - I really very much appreciate it - will give this a go this evening.

Be warned I'm not the most sophisticated IT person so I may have some more questions ... apologies in advance ...

I did the above - moved the media folder to the set up and then did the File > reorganise files - it brought up a status bar and whizzed through things at lightning speed completed in 4 minutes - end result is that all songs are still exclamation marked ...

That's OK. I just wanted to make sure that the library was organized to use the modern layout which puts music files at <Media Folder>\Music\<Artist>\<Album>, instead of the older layout of <Media Folder>\<Artist>\<Album>.

Assuming you've also manually moved the files into this newer layout you can now try to use Get Info > Locate or Play > Locate to trigger iTunes into repairing the broken links. If iTunes can't or won't do it then the FindTracks script should.

tt2

Hmm, I wonder if iTunes has crashed? You may need to force it closed and see if my script can do it, though it will be slow too. Try a few tens or hundreds to start with to see how it performs. If you cannot get the script to display a progress bar then you'll want to use smaller batches.

tt2

From the top of the scripts page:

The general method of use is to download a script (double-click or right-click and use Download or Save As...) to a folder of your choice, e.g. your Desktop, Downloads folder or create a folder at ...\iTunes\Scripts. Select a playlist or highlight some tracks in iTunes and then double-click on the script to execute it. If no specific tracks are selected the script will try to work with all tracks in the current playlist or sometimes the entire library. Some scripts offer a choice of track by track confirmation of changes or fully automatic processing of the selection. Many of the scripts can optionally display a progress bar while running.

tt2

jonnyreggae wrote:
However, the iTunes library now cannot find around 2000 files. Every time I click to play the exclamation mark pops up and i have to manually find the new location, and there is no function to make the library realise that it could find all the missing files there. Is there any way round this problem?

Second problem is that now I have pointed iTunes in the right direction to the new drive (Lacie/iTunes) there seems to be a new folder created by iTunes called Music to which new imports are added. This folder sits in amongst all my other artist folders. How can I get iTunes to not do this?