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iTunes can’t can’t find music files on external back-up

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  • Redbaaron

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    Posted: 08 May 2009 02:31 PM

    So I keep my music files on an external drive. Every once in a while I forget to plug it in, or I open iTunes before it mounts on the desktop and as a default iTunes then downloads podcasts or whatever into the music folder on my user account. And this is fine, because I can later consolidate library and everything is happy again. . . in theory anyway.

    So when this happens and it doesn’t happen often, maybe a couple times a year, I go to iTunes prefs/advanced tab, and remind it where the music files live and it says OK but then when I try to play a song the little “!” in a circle pops up and says it can’t find the file would you like to locate it? And of course I say no because I don’t want to locate over 13,000 songs individually. I also don’t want to just drag all the music over and rebuild the library because all my playlists and album art gets screwed up.

    I have found I can fix it by going into time machine and restoring my iTunes LIB file to the way it was the night before and it works fine. But that is a pain when I don’t have my Time Machine drive on hand like today when I’m at work and my iTunes is screwed until I can go home.

    Isn’t there a way to just tell it where the music files are on an external drive and everything will link back up automatically? Should I not have the keep iTunes music folder organized button checked or something. Why do I have to restore the LIB file for it to work?

    If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it. I have a work around with Time Machine but I feel there is a better way.

    Thanks in advance.
    Aaron from Buffalo

         
     

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