I have a PC running Windows 11. When I first moved my Itunes library to the PC it ended up being stored in onedrive. I hate onedrive. Somehow in moving the library out of onedrive to my normal file system, the library organization including all playlists were destroyed. I still have all the music files but I need to rebuild the library. I can't figure out how to do that. Help would be GREATLY appreciated.
Windows, Windows 10
See Import media from a computer to iTunes on PC - Apple Support. I would suggest you copy the content out of the OneDrive drive folder into the normal ..\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media folder before adding it to the library. iTunes won't work correctly with OneDrive files that aren't stored locally. Once all is in your library you can start building playlists again.
If you happen to have the original iTunes Library.itl file that held your playlists on your previous computer then it might be possible to get that working again, should you wish.
tt2
See Import media from a computer to iTunes on PC - Apple Support. I would suggest you copy the content out of the OneDrive drive folder into the normal ..\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media folder before adding it to the library. iTunes won't work correctly with OneDrive files that aren't stored locally. Once all is in your library you can start building playlists again.
If you happen to have the original iTunes Library.itl file that held your playlists on your previous computer then it might be possible to get that working again, should you wish.
tt2
There is a now four year old bug in iTunes that, at least for some users, seems to stop the media folder preference from being saved properly. This means that it resets to the folder iTunes Media in the same location as the .itl file. See Make a split library portable - Apple Community and put your library in a shape that isn't affected by the issue, and is easier to backup and move around in future.
tt2
In most cases you simply need to copy the entire iTunes folder from your old computer into the user's music folder of the new computer, then deauthorize the old computer if you no longer wish to access protected iTunes content on it. For details, see:
Move your iTunes library to a new computer - Apple Community
See also How to move your iTunes library to a new computer - Apple Support for Apple's approach to this topic.
I don't think I fully explained my problem. I moved my iTunes library to my new PC a year ago without realizing all the files were stored in onedrive. I really dislike onedrive. I am now trying to move my whole library over to my normal PC file system. All of the files seem to be there but my iTunes library only shows files that I had downloaded from the internet in the past. None of the music that came in on CD or that was already there when I first got the PC is showing up but the files seem to be there. I am trying to find out how I can cause my library to be rebuilt.
I have mostly good news but one remaining piece of bad news.
I have successfully gotten my entire iTunes library onto the non onedrive part of my file system. That is a huge relief. Thank you all for the help!!
Here is the one piece of bad news. When I first started iTunes, it wanted to use the itunes files on Onedrive. I changed what files to use by editing preferences to point to the itunes files in my regular file system. Everything was cool. I stopped iTunes and restarted it. Somehow it had decided to change the location of my iTunes files BACK to onedrive! For the life of me, I can not figure out why it did that and does it every single time I change the location of the iTunes files to my regular file system. When I next try iTunes it has relapsed to Onedrive. This really isn't anything to do with iTunes so I am probably now in the wrong forum but if anyone has an idea what might be going on here, I would greatly appreciate hearing what you have to say. I should say I have done everything humanly possible to stop Onedrive. I have even deleted onedrive from my file system but as soon as I restart my PC, it is back. Clearly I am missing some trick to finally get rid of onedrive forever.
I have decided to surrender to Microsoft's insistence that I keep OneDrive around. I have all my music files in OneDrive and nothing else. It all works. I have set OneDrive to just be a file directory. It no longer tries to back anything up to a cloud. There was a jingle on a cigarette commercial about 50 years ago that said I would rather fight than switch. My version is "to switch is too much of a fight".
Thanks for all the help!
Rebuilding my iTunes library on a PC
