Q: Original File cannot be found error on over 4000 songs.
I tried posting this in the iTunes for Mac section of this forum but no one responded. Please forgive me for reposting here. I hope that someone can help me. (I've had this problem before and all the help I've received on this forum has not worked. I just really want to get my iTunes library sorted out.)
To start from the beginning I originally kept my iTunes library on my internal hard drive. However, it was getting large and I needed to move it so I moved it to an external drive. Then I recently upgraded my internal hard drive to a 1 TB hard drive so that I would have plenty of space for everything. I then moved my iTunes library to the new drive, or so I thought. It is all technically there. (As you can see from the bottom screen shot.) However, for some reason iTunes is looking in the trash for a good portion of my library. (I have 4400+ songs and 4000+ of them are showing the exclamation point and this error.) I know that I must have done all of the moving around incorrectly. (I followed directions from some blog I googled, big mistake.) Now I just want to get my library how it should be. All back together on this new internal drive with no dups etc.
I have over 4000 songs giving me this error. I can go in one by one on each song and find it in the iTunes Media folder. But I certainly don't want to do it that way. Here is the info on where the song(s) seem to be currently:
Here's a shot of my preferences:
Just FYI, I know that apparently iTunes is looking for this music in the trash. However, if I go here:
Then I find the music there as well. (Which is where it is in my preferences.)
Please help! I don't want to have to go through over 4000 songs and update them one by one. The music is apparently in both the trash and in my iTunes media folder. How do I get iTunes to look for these 4000+ songs in the right place without going in one by one to fix them?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
MacBook (13-inch Aluminum Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Posted on Aug 22, 2012 8:16 AM
I notice you have "Copy music to iTunes folder" etc. turned off in your preferences. So do I, but I have a reason for doing that and more or less know what I am doing (I hope). Until you've really internalized how iTunes works I would suggest sticking to default settings which is having both "copy to" and "organize" selected for your iTunes.
Maybe that is the problem...?
Uh, you're going to have to tell us what the problems are! I'm not in front of your computer! You say you have 4400+ tracks of which 4000 are unlinked. Do you have that many in that folder of unlinked items?
Do this:
- Make sure iTunes is using the library.itl in your Music > iTunes folder (the default location) (it may already be doing that).
- Activate the preference settings so iTunes organizes things and moves them into the iTunes folder in future. It may ask you if you want to do that now for existing items and say okay.
- Drag the folder that seems to have all your missing items (that "iTunes Music" folder) to the "automatically add to" folder. Maybe it will end up with you having a bunch of duplicates, half of which are dead links and the other half of which are those files which are now moved to the Music > iTunes > Media > Music folder. Dead links we can take care of later. Right now we're trying to collect your music and make it active..
- I'm also a bit concerned about those items you are finding in the trash. Not having sat at your elbow for the past month I don't know their origin. Note a couple of track names and see if they are duplicates of anything that ends up being active in your iTunes collection. If they are truly unique then drag them out of the trash onto the add-to folder.
Posted on Aug 22, 2012 3:54 PM


