Learn How to Manage Your iTunes Library
My latest Macworld article discusses managing your iTunes library: where your files are stored, how to move them and move all your music, how to back up your files and more. No matter how big your library is, these tips will help you manage it more efficiently.
Posted: 6/4/2008 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes | 2 Comments »
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One item that I would have liked to see in the article is a way to automatically
re-link to files that iTunes has "lost". I have a 12000 song library with a few
hundred songs that iTunes claims it can’t find despite all being in my iTunes
Music folder.
Double-clicking the song will allow me to track it down manually, but it is a very
tedious task. There has to be a way to automate it.
I’m afraid there isn’t. I went through this recently after my son screwed up
and, when moving a library from an iMac to an external disk to a replacement
iMac, had changed the name of the startup volume to match the name of his
music volume. In short, the path was /Music instead of /Volumes/Music, and
he had to re-link some 4000 files.
Now, if you don’t care about play counts and last played dates, you can just
delete everything from the library and drag the music into iTunes, which will
give you correct pointers. But if you care about that data, you’re basically
screwed.
Kirk