[iTunes] Lost Contents of Playlists

[William Hill]

This problem continues to drive me crazy. If I simply copy my entire 
iTunes folder from my back-up to my main drive, the songs are all 
listed in the Library, and the playlists are complete, but the links to 
all of the songs are broken and I get the "the original file could not 
be found" message. If I use the "Add to Library" command, and select 
the iTunes folder from my back-up, the songs are installed with the 
links intact, but the playlists don't show up. If I then copy the music 
library file, the playlists appear, but all of the links to the songs 
are broken. What the bleep?? Is there a way to repair the links to the 
songs without having to go through one by one? And yes, I tried the 
"Consolidate Library" command; this resulted in an additional, 
linked-up copy of each song in my library; if I got rid of the 
non-linked songs, my playlists went away also.

Help!

William Hill


On Dec 1, 2004, at 12:01 PM, John Griffin wrote:

> William Hill typed this message on 12/1/04 2:49 PM:
>
>>
>> I recently had to re-format my hard drive. When I loaded up everything
>> from my back-up, although the titles of my play lists came back, the
>> songs that they contained did not. I have all of the songs. My
>> question: where in the back-up files would I find the play list
>> contents?
>
> The iTunes folder is found in your Music folder which is in your user
> folder. What has happened is that the path info to your iTunes music 
> folder
> somehow got fudged.
>
> What you can do is get iTunes to do a "Consolidate" Music command 
> (under the
> Advanced Menu). It then goes through your entire hard drive and 
> transfers
> all your music anywhere it can find it to iTunes. Or you could do an 
> Import
> from the File menu and pick the iTunes folder through the Open/Save 
> dialog.
>
> Or, finally you could just navigate with the Finder to your iTunes 
> folder
> and do a drag and drop of the folder on the iTunes application.
>
> After doing this, it would be wise to have iTunes eliminate duplicates.
>
> jg
>
>
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