Material in library not appearin in itunes library folder on hard drive

Question

Level 1

7 points

Material in library not appearin in itunes library folder on hard drive

I have a problem that is opposite to what some people have mentioned. I recently lost my system hard drive on my PC (windows 10) and when I purchased a new disk drive and reinstalled windows, much of the music on my itunes library and all my play lists were gone, including many of the CDs I'd added from hand and some I'd purchased some time ago. Clearly I hadn't backed it up recently enough. Sigh. But that's not the issue itself.

After painstakingly reinstalling everything I'd purchased from itunes and using my DVD player to reinstall my own CDs and recreating my play list by hand, everything looks good when I opened itunes. I want to make sure I don't lose the library again, so I went to my C drive to transfer my itunes library to an external drive for safekeeping. But when I open the music library under microsoft explorer (or whatever it is called), many of the albums and songs in my library are still not listed, even though I can see them and play them from itunes. When I went into the C drive directly (path: This PC>Local Disc (C:)>Users>Myname>Music>itunes>itunes Media>Music) I had the same issue--the songs and albums I'd added over the past two days are not reflected in the list of music there.

So I want to get the itunes library folder in my music folder on my C drive to reflect what is actually in itunes (when I open the program) so I can back it up.

How can I do this? Thanks for any insights!

Windows, Windows 6

Posted on Jan 20, 2020 4:47 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Leanne_68

Community Specialist

Jan 23, 2020 2:48 PM in response to elwagner

Hey elwagner,

Having an iTunes library tuned to your tastes is a bit of an art, so I totally see why you want to have that available and backed up. I'd be glad to help you with that.

So what it sounds like you want to do is consolidate your iTunes library. What this will do is take all of those media files that you can see in iTunes and make copies and store them within the media folder, rather than just having iTunes connect to all of their different locations. Look over the "Consolidate your iTunes Library" section of Back up and restore your iTunes library on your PC for detailed steps on completing that process.

From there, if you wish to back up the library on an external drive, the rest of that page can help with that also, so it's a double win.

Hopefully that helps!

Take care.

Reply

Answer 2

the fiend

Level 7

22,932 points

Jan 24, 2020 12:25 PM in response to elwagner

If you have trouble working out where the music is stored you can select a song in iTunes and use Edit/Song Info/File>location to find out where it is stored. Then look in the appropriate folder to see if anything else is in there too:

As you can see, although this song is in my Music folder, it is not in the iTunes sub-folder inside it. Instead, it's in a folder named Amazon MP3, which was created by Amazon's downloader app. Amazon's automatic function has been removed, but I continue to manually put my Amazon purchases in to the Amazon folder for consistency.

Here's another song, this time in the iTunes/iTunes Music folder:

Reply

Material in library not appearin in itunes library folder on hard drive

Similar questions