How to reinstall my music folder from back up drive after reinstalling Yosemite?

Question

How to reinstall my music folder from back up drive after reinstalling Yosemite?

A few months ago I had upgraded to Yosemite on my 2010 iMac. Is working fine but noticed lots of ads/ crappy website popping up so decided to back up photos and music and some important files and reinstall Yosemite onto a clean hard drive. Might have the terminology wrong here but I followed the process (through Disk Utility) to erase the Macintosh HD and reinstall a new version of Yosemite onto a clean hard drive.

Is working great and have successfully imported my photos into Photos however my music I can't seem to get to work properly. I have copied all music files (the album folders) into Music/ ITunes/ ITunes Media/ all my music folders but in iTunes it only shows about 12 albums not the 230'ish albums.

I am happy that I haven't lost them as I have them on my back up drive and when I click through the above folders they are in my iTunes Media folder and I can play the music (.m4a files) from this folder but want to get them recognised in iTunes.

I'm doing something wrong but don't know what! I'm not technical and not keen on using the Cloud so hence why I have all the files on back up drives.

Any help please!

Mark

iMac (21.5-inch Late 2009), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Jul 31, 2015 11:24 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 1, 2015 7:54 AM in response to MarkyMelbourne

Marky, if you're not concerned about playlists and ratings, but just want to get the music to show up in iTunes, you can drag-and-drop the iTunes Media folder into the iTunes window. That will cause iTunes to import everything that's in the folder (as long as it's in a supported format like MP3 or m4a).

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Answer 2

Aug 1, 2015 6:00 PM in response to richard grant

Hi Richard. Thanks for the reply. Just to be sure I'm doing it right - when you say drag to the iTunes window (what is the window?)

Thanks again.

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Answer 3

Aug 1, 2015 6:31 PM in response to richard grant

Richard, subsequent to my response re which is the window I dragged and dropped to the iTunes symbol in the dock and it has brought them all over. Many thanks for your help - has saved me lots of anxiety.

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Answer 4

Rysz

Level 8

44,391 points

Aug 1, 2015 7:33 PM in response to MarkyMelbourne

If you backed up the entire Music or iTunes folder, then copy back the entire folder.

When you copy individual album folders, the iTunes database is not updated, so iTunes doesn't know they even exist. If you only backed up the music files, use the File > Add To Library function in iTunes, and point it to the folder where these albums are located.

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Answer 5

Aug 7, 2015 1:54 AM in response to Rysz

Thanks for you help. Will know what to do next time.

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