The newest v. of iTunes has wiped out all playlists and my entire library

bernyx wrote:

another question, now that I'm restoring the playlists, I sometimes click on a song and get a message " the song cannot be used because the original file could not be located" would you like to locate it. I know the location, but it asks you to do the same for every song in the playlist, is there anyway to do this for all the songs at once?

This happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, or that the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout,or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place.

Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to get info, then cancel when asked to try to locate the track. Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions.

Alternatively, as long as you can find a location holding the missing files, then you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes.

tt2

bernyx wrote:

Actually just found the shortcut, delete all the songs from the playlist, then drag the whole folder back into the playlist agian.

That approach is fine as long as you don't mind losing ratings, play counts etc. Depending on just how you did it you may also still have broken links in your main library, and have created duplicates.

tt2

thanks, it's just quite a mess. I had 3 folders for Itunes music. For some reason it recently created a new directory when i started to restore the playlists, however I changed the directory back to the old one, which copied the stuff into the previous one. At least there wasn't a whole lot in the new directory. I just have to deal with it step by step.

No worries, don't overlook iTunes Folder Watch as a useful tool for making the library agree with the media folder. If you have generated dupes in your efforts you can clean these up with my DeDuper script...

tt2

I gather that if you use the watch folder, it would add the music to itunes automatically but it wouldn't be in any specific folder?

If you currently have media in folders representing playlists then I guess a mass import isn't what you need. As you'll have found iTunes doesn't care what path stuff is on, just as long as it doesn't move once it has been added to the library.

tt2

Well the watch folder helps, the only thing is to rename the folder to what you want after it's added.

Now I checked out itunes library toolkit also. I clicked on scan and add, and it started adding things and giving it the playlist name, the same as each folder. I aborted it because I was just checking to see how it works. The next time I tried it again and this time it just started adding to the library without separating into folders, kind of puzzling.