I'm glad you elaborated.
That's why the songs won't go into the Playlists then. My guess is that you pointed iTunes to the external drive and effectively told iTunes to use those files (in that location). Now that the external drive isn't there (or it has another drive letter assigned to it), iTunes can no longer find the files (the song-files).
There's an important distinction between a song and a file (or song-file)
- the song is what you hear
- the file is what iTunes uses to play the song for you
They are the same thing; it's just that when you ask iTunes to play a particular song, it looks outside of iTunes (and onto your computer) for the file as the source of that song. What you work with, inside iTunes, when you ask it to play a song, or when you edit the song in some way, is the song.
You may need to read through the rest of this post a few times first, before trying to do it, to make sure you've understood what I'm suggesting. Once you do, actually doing it should be easier.
What you needed to do was copy the songs to your computer and then add them to your iTunes Library.
Think of it like this:
when you add a song to your iTunes Library, what you are actually doing is telling iTunes where to find that song and all iTunes does is list it. The songs are listed inside of iTunes, but the files are outside iTunes. So in other words, iTunes is a database, that knows where the songs are. If the file is then moved, renamed or deleted, or the drive is no longer connected, it cannot play the song. Hence the message you get.
At this point you may be thinking "why doesn't Apple make all this clear?"
It's a good question (even though I asked it). Unfortunately, I think computer programmers' minds just don't work in the same way as the rest of us. (That's not a compliment.)
So - hopefully, you still have access to the hard drive that had the old songs it (or the old computer). You obviously need access to them. Read through the next points and decide which method you want to use to resolve this issue. You have two options (well, plus a fallback, just in case):
- leave the music on the external drive and keep it connected to your computer. If you're lucky (really lucky) all you then need to do is try and play the songs. As long the songs have the same filepath as they did when you first told iTunes about them, all you would need to do is play the song - and iTunes will find it. The next two sub-points are very important:
- With this method, that external drive will have to be connected to your computer and ready to read before you start up iTunes. That's every time
- The drive will also have to have the same drive letter every time. You may wish to use this method if you're short of storage on your computer
- alternatively, you may wish to copy the files from the external drive, onto your computer and then tell iTunes where to find those files. You would do this by trying to play a song and when it fails, you then tell iTunes where to find it now. If you manage to do this correctly, iTunes would then look in the same filepath for any other missing music and sort out the missing ones by itself
The "fallback" option is to:
- delete the old non-working entries in iTunes
- then use either of the above methods to add the music to iTunes. You would do that by using the command File/Add folder to Library and then navigate to the master folder where the music is located. Don't forget to take into account whether you have copied the music to the computer, or whether you're telling iTunes to use an external drive.
You could try with a couple of songs and see how you get on. Once you understand the process, it should be far easier to do for the rest of your Library.
