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iTunes 12 won't locate music with special characters

Hi there


I recently upgraded to Windows 10 on my laptop and after some troubles have iTunes installed and working properly. Everything is working great except some songs or albums (not in the iTunes media folder) aren't being located (it shows the '!' next to the songs). I can show iTunes where the file is on my computer but it doesn't automatically locate the rest of the songs/albums in the folder. It seems to be only happening to songs with special characters (like é or õ) in the song or album name and it will take a while for me to manually relocate about 100 songs.


Is there a way to fix this issue or easily relocate these songs, or will I have to wait for an update to fix this?


Thanks

Other OS, Windows 10

Posted on Aug 24, 2015 8:50 PM

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10 replies

Sep 1, 2015 6:01 PM in response to Bockadilla

That probably explains why both iTunes and my tool are struggling. If you give me some examples of how the tags relate to the file paths I might be able to tweak the script a little. Alternatively copy the broken tracks into the Automatically Add to iTunes folder and then use the DeDuper script to sort out the duplicates while retaining ratings, play counts, playlist membership, etc.


tt2

Sep 1, 2015 6:17 PM in response to turingtest2

Ok yeah, do you mean tags as in the file structure? I have various soundtrack folders set out by series/franchise name and then the individual album folders inside (if that makes sense) 😀 The tracks also have the track number at the start of the file name. I would prefer to keep this structure as opposed to moving it all to the iTunes Media folder.

Sep 2, 2015 5:13 PM in response to Bockadilla

Here is my "missing tracks" boilerplate post.


The "missing file" error happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, one of its parent folders, or the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place.


Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to Get Info, then click No when asked to try to locate the track. (Due to a bug in iTunes 12 you currently have to say No twice!) Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, a folder renamed, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. If the difference between the two paths is an additional Music folder in one path then this is a layout issue. I can explain further if that is the case.


In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. Although it says something like "use the same location" it expects to find the tracks in the same artist & album layout that it generates, not all in one big folder.


If another application like Windows Media Player has moved/renamed the files then the chances are that subtle differences in naming strategies will make it hard to restore the media to the precise path that iTunes is expecting. In such cases, as long as the missing files can be found somewhere, you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes. See this post for an explanation of how it works.


FindTracks works best when the files are in a typical <Artist>\<Album>\## <Name>.<Ext> layout, but it copes with a number of variations as explained in that last link. If you can give me an example of the path to one of your lost files and file's properties I might be able to give the script a tweak that makes it find your files.


tt2

Sep 16, 2015 5:11 AM in response to turingtest2

Hi again,


Sorry for the delayed reply. I managed to fix this in another way. When I installed Windows 10 it made my username the first half of my username, which was kind of annoying, so I decided I'd try and change it just to my name (like it was in Windows 8 before). After changing it iTunes automatically found everything in the iTunes media folder when I started it up. All other songs were marked as missing, though once I manually located one song it located each one, except for the few tracks which it was having trouble before and I manually located before. The rest of the album which was still marked as missing was found straight away. The file layout mustn't have been a problem because iTunes was able to find the rest of my music easily which is mostly set out in the same layout.


Now I'm just kind of confused as to why it couldn't relocate those few tracks/albums which contained special characters (even though there were others that were found that did have special characters). I only assume it was because of the album/track names because that's the only thing I could see that those tracks had in common.


Thanks for your help 🙂

iTunes 12 won't locate music with special characters

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