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5% of my songs have broken 'location' links - to random locations!

I have a Macbook with a Synology NAS hard drive, which I moved my iTunes library to recently. I used iTunes itself to make the moved (i.e. told iTunes I wanted the library in the NAS folder, told it to organise itself, and let it copy the files over).


While 95% of the files transferred correctly, some of them appear to have completely screwed-up file locations. One song below is linked to a folder containing university notes! iTunes doesn't even realise there's a problem - when I try to play it, it simply moves on to the next song and plays that instead (i.e. it doesn't even list it with an exclamation mark as a broken file). I first realised there was a problem when I tried to drag a couple of dozen files out of iTunes to put on a USB stick: 95% of them copied fine, but a few of them ended up copying 2GB folders across - because that's where the song was now linked to in iTunes.


The key issue seems to be that all of the 'broken' songs link to completely random, non-MP3, files. Another guy appears to have had the same problem some years ago, but other than him I can't find many references on the internet: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/66364/itunes-library-pointing-to-comple tely-wrong-files


Here's my question: how do I go through my iTunes database and identify all songs for which the location field is set to something other than an mp3 file (all my music is mp3), and - where it is wrongly set - correct it? I'm happy to pay for commercial software to do it.


Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.2)

Posted on Mar 31, 2015 5:57 PM

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1 reply

Apr 1, 2015 8:34 PM in response to RossUK

I don't really have an answer for you but upon reading this I see it as a classic example of how iTunes and NAS sometimes do not nicely play together well. I guess some people get them to work (the people who do not post here 🙂 ) but basically iTunes is probably not tested with NAS. I believe NAS use some software to communicate between your Mac OS and the drive which might possibly be Windows formatted. You are at the mercy of that software. The only thing I can suggest is to check your file names and make sure they are as simple as possible so they comply with any possible naming system which could be involved. No accents or punctuation, maybe not even any spaces, etc.

5% of my songs have broken 'location' links - to random locations!

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