iTunes suddenly cannot find any of my music or videos. I was cleaning up my drives and did not delete *anything* that was labeled as an iTunes or library file, but all my videos (and there are many) and music (and there is a lot) is no longer in the library (the names are there but it says the files cannot be located. I *did not move them. This will take days to restore if I have to do it manually. Is there any other way?
There are three main approaches you can take when there are missing links in the library. You can try to move the files to where iTunes thinks they should be, you can try to use a script to predict where the file is and if found tell iTunes the new location, or you can import the files from their new locations and then deduplicate, discarding the items with the broken links. Some metadata such as rating, dated added, play count, playlist membership, etc. lives only in the iTunes library, so this is lost if you reimport the lost content and clean up. I have a script called DeDuper which can preserve some of this information, but not date added. Video files may also lose some properties that would normally be captured in tags for mp3 or aac files. There is a slim possibility that the DeDuper script won't be able to match your reimported files but again that is something that might be tweaked if needed.
I've updated FindTracks to give it a chance of finding your TV Shows if you start the search from E:\Handbrake. If you don't have any luck could you post a screenshot of running my GetInfo script against one of those Colombo episodes, or an episode where if doesn't work, so I can see what information there is to work with?
tt2
Hi. Thank you for all that work!
First, an update from me: I signed in as another user on the computer and used a previous iTunes library (archived from April). Which I hoped would mean everything worked as before, but it didn’t. Nevertheless, I ran your script and was able to restore most of the music. No such luck with TV shows, even when I drilled down to the exact target file, bypassing higher level folders.
So now I have two iTunes libraries (one for each user), neither of which has all TV content, though the episodes are indeed listed.
How does that affect your advice?
Well one reason it may not be working for me is that I am unfortunately not following.
Let me check if I have this right:
1) I should have one iTunes file with titles but primarily broken links to content. (ie file cannot be located)
2) I should build another iTunes file using Folder Import or somesuch. (presumably links to content will work in this case)
3) I select some files in (1) and run ExportImportAltKey, which creates a text file
4) "Drag the text file created earlier and drop it onto the script." (What script? All I have is a text file, no?)
Can you please confirm 1 through 3 and respond re 4? Thanks again.
You are a genius! This worked really well -- still a bit of cleanup to do, but WAY less than if I had done all this by hand. Thanks very much.
For music, I should go back and create a new iTunes library by re-importing all my music files, use ExportImport and move to my new repaired library, right?
Thanks again for the help!
True, but that is in another library. I was thinking I would take some time and re-import the music files, this time into the new repaired file (the one with correct TV shows). But perhaps I can just copy/paste? Or import from library rather than from raw files?
Hello again. Just thought I owed you an update: it turns out there were more videos to connect to manually than I initially thought -- by no means the whole batch, but still quite a few. I am unable to identify what is so different with them that they did not succumb to the ExportImport exercise. So I am working my way through them, unless you have any magic to recommend. I restored all my music files using Add Folder and then removing duplicates. So my library is substantially restored. Thank you very much!
Made the changes to script but must not be doing this right. While it is easy to select episodes 1-26 of program X in the library with the metadata, it is challenging to find the 26 corresponding episodes in the library without the metadata. I tried selecting fewer episodes but that (a) didn't work either and (b) is no faster than manual re-entry.
To confirm:
1) select files from library with metadata, run ExImport, save text.
2) close that library, open library without metadata, and drag text to the ExIm vbs file and watch the magic.
Only, no magic 😟
Hello again. Thought I should bring you up to date and close this thread. This ExImport function worked for some files but not many (may have been a function of how those were stored; ITunes reported multiple versions with same file name, but they were separate episodes). So I had to restore those manually.
With your great help, I have now restored the library fully and am keeping regular backups. Thanks again for all your help!
Before I do that, I should tell you that videos are on another drive. Does that affect your advice?
Thanks. Will try this evening.
Nvm. No content there. Back to your suggestion.
Everything you are doing, and what TuringTest2 are right on the money. Hang in there!
(My hubby is the itune fiend, I'm his tech support. He says when I need help, it's serious. )
Thanks. This is puzzling, as I have pointed iTunes directly at (1) my music files and then (2) at my video files. Some loaded, many do not.
Sounds daunting but I will give it a try. I saved the script -- but didn't see instructions on how to use it? What did I miss?
See this post for an explanation of how it works. It might need some tweaking if your media is in a non-standard layout.
tt2
I saw that but did not see instructions. As it is not an exe file, how do I run it?
itunes cannot find files
