New PC with library on external drive--no playlists or ratings?

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Level 1

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New PC with library on external drive--no playlists or ratings?

My previous Win8.1 PC finally died after six years (power supply, I suspect, but it could have been more)--so I picked up a new 8.1 Dell. I had previous been using an external drive as the library for iTunes. Upon firing up iTunes, it did recognize the drive and added the music automatically. Curiously, I had to manually add books, podcasts, and movies. However, all my playlists and song ratings are gone. I could theoretically extract the C drive from my old PC, but I'm wondering if there's some other way to retrieve them. Any ideas? Thanks...

Windows 8

Posted on Apr 22, 2015 6:58 PM

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Answer 1

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hhgttg27

Level 5

5,591 points

Apr 23, 2015 3:48 AM in response to adambravo2

The symptoms you describe correspond to the situation where you have your media on the external drive but the iTunes database (where playlists, ratings, etc. are stored) on the C: drive. If you can access the old drive, look for the C:\Users\username\Music\iTunes folder, and in particular for the iTunes Library.itl file. Then see turingtest2's user tip on Make a split library portable for steps necessary to bring your library into a standardized layout - I'd suggest that you aim to have the complete library on the external drive, in this structure:

where you primarily make use of iTunes' consolidation functions to move files and folders into this structure. Once everything's in place, get a second external drive and use this tocreate and maintain a backup of your library(much easier with this "well formed" layout since everything you need to backup is in a common folder).

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