iTunes help please

[ChasMill]

Managed to kill my home PC last weekend (serves me right for attacking the motherboard I suppose).

New shiny HP machine delivered and all my files transferred over from the old hard drive.

Install the latest version of iTunes.

So far, so good.

Now here comes the problem:

None of the tunes purchased from the iTunes store appear - all I get is the following:

"The song cannot be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"

Some tunes I can find, some not.

Also, nearly all the tunes in the music library appear twice - once with what looks like an exclamation mark next to it (and displaying the same message as above when I try to play it) and once as normal.

I could simply delete the "extra" tracks but as I have over five thousand, this might take some time!

Any ideas please?

 

[EggChaser]

Not sure about the duplicated names - but iTunes has two storage modes, one of which can contribute to the missing files issue

Default mode is add MP3 file to file lists but leave the files where they are and just link references to them inside the iTunes database - this results in MP3 files being spread all over the place as it depends on where you manually put them - and then makes it difficult to manage. Also means if you copy the database then the exact paths for every single file have to be copied / recreated which can be a problem when moving between machines and can cause the loss of the files even thought the database still knows about them

Then non-deafult mode is to organise the music using the setting to "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized" this will copy every file you import into one folder structure making it really easy to manage and backup/move between computers - only problem with this is it is a copy which mean you will need to delete the file from the original location once you are happy it has been correctly added. I tend to suggest to most friends that they use this mode if possible.

Unfortunately I am not sure of any easy way to fix the broken links if you were originally in the default mode, - other than deleting the database and then letting iTunes search the whole harddisk to find music files - which is a bit sledgehammer and will almost certainly need a lot of manual adjustment. Maybe someone else will come along with an idea.

 

[Bahnstormer]

This might help

Had the same message when I converted to Win7 and iTunes wouldn't play tracks unless the back up drive was still attached.

Turned out that I needed to tick a couple of boxes, so in iTunes, go Edit, Preferences, Advanced and make sure you've got the box "Copy to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" ticked.

Now watch it take a whole lot longer rather than seconds to copy the tracks to your new HD.

Good luck.

PD