Fixing the numerous iTunes Exclamation Point's

Yep, that's fine. I found the thread in question. I can't speak for everyone but I'm always happy to help if I can and don't really mind what gets tagged on to where as long it's helping someone get to a solution. 🙂

tt2

My solution was to direct iTunes to a blank directory for the location of the music library. Then I quit iTunes, relaunched and all my music appeared in the list but "could not be found". I went to the songs tab, deleted all songs and had an empty iTunes. Then I redirected iTunes to the relocated folder, quit, relaunched and everything is now fine. Seems iTunes remembers the songs from where they were before they were moved. So emptying iTunes and reloading cured that issue. Hope this helps!

Hello,

I had the same problem. I had a buch of songs in my MacBok and another buch in my external HD. Sometimes when I used iTunes without my external HD, it marked a loooooot of songs because iTunes couldn't find the original file, since I was using Shuffle and picked songs randomly. I cracked my head on how to restore all the ! marked song without finding the original file in each song.

The question to you is, do yo have the original files in the same location as always or you moved them?

If you haven't move them, the solution to remove the ! marks is simple:

Force quit iTunes, reopen it and all the ! will be gone.

At least it worked for me.

Cheers

H

All I did was click on the song and it asked me to find it. So then I went into my hard drive. You can search by song or artist. Found most of them. Hope this helps🙂

I recently had to replace some hard drives and things got moved around, so iTunes is not able to find the links. I do not allow iTunes to manage my files so that are stored in a folder 'My Music' with subfolders that reflect backup # (e.g., 'My Music\Disk 1\') or content (e.g., 'My Music\Celtic\'). I see that iTunes shows my file location as:

'file://localhost/F:/My Music...' I assume that if I can alter the info to read 'G:/My Music...' or file://localhost/G:/My Music...' that it should resolve my issues.

I looked at your FindTracks.vbs script and it is lovely, but does not really allow me to do a direct disc letter substitution. Any suggestions?

I have started looking closer at the script text itself to see if I can alter it (I have some VBA experience) and you document like I do, not quite enough to make it very clear, but enough to help decipher it with effort. Before putting in the effort I thought I would contact you to see if you have suggestions--including of course things like 'Well you cant just change the disc letter...'

I have looked a little more at your FindTracks script and also GetInfo.vbs

I am finding that 'tracks.location' is returning an empty value rather than the 'file://localhost/f:/My Music...' string that iTunes displays for Get Info (Ctrl + I) command. I think that property should be giving me what I want. Am I incorrect in my interpretation of .location? Is there another property? Is it blank because the link is broken so iTunes can provide the 'location'?

Thanks.

kurtisthesane wrote:

.... and you document like I do, not quite enough to make it very clear, but enough to help decipher it with effort.

An excellent description, and I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one! 👿

Before putting in the effort I thought I would contact you to see if you have suggestions--including of course things like 'Well you cant just change the disc letter...'

The issue is that iTunes won't pass the script the "file://localhost" version of the path if the file is missing. When the script asks for a track's location iTunes replies with the actual location for found files, or an empty string if missing. The script is designed to make an educated guess as to where the file should be based on tag properties and then tries to locate the file.

If it is possible to rejig the drive letters to restore the values they had when the library last worked properly then it should all start working again...

Otherwise take a look at this post: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3621627

Without knowing more about the folder structure that you have used it is hard to say how much work is involved, but it should be possible to extend the rules for deciding where to look to suit your needs.

In the long run I would recommend that anything you currently have codified in the folder structure gets stored in tags, such as genre, grouping or comments. Then you could afford to use a more typical layout. If you still want things your way, it is possible to do so in a manner which allows the library to be moved around as long as you can arrange to have all the media inside one media folder (organized any way you like) which is in turn inside an iTunes library folder. See make a split library portable for more.

tt2

Well, if I make another F: drive with the files on it, could I run a script to change the location to the files on the G: drive?

Is there any good reason why you can't make the current F: into H: and then G: into F: using diskmgmt.msc ?

tt2