[X4U] consolidating iTunes library

[Stroller]

On Mar 3, 2005, at 1:12 am, Kevin Lee Allen wrote:
>
> My wife and I ripped our CD collection into itunes, storing different 
> parts on different systems and drives. I recently upgraded on system 
> and was readily able to consolidate. Now I am trying to consolidate 
> two of the original libraries onto her system One is on her drive, the 
> remainder actually on two systems. Either of the latter two is a 
> complete set.

I recently transferred my whole MP3 collection - of about 12gigs, 2000 
songe into iTunes, so hopefully I can answer this.

> When I consolidate, I see a small grey circle with an exclamation 
> point icon in the left column of iTunes for songs on another drive. I 
> can individually locate these and copy, but I hope there is a way to 
> do a mass import.

As Kirk pointed out, that means iTunes can't find the file. I used to 
get this a lot when my files were on an SMB share & when I organised 
them myself - if the MP3 share was mounted then perhaps I'd moved the 
song into another folder whilst tidying.

I'd advise finding all the songs with a grey circle in your music 
library & deleting them. Then ensure in iTunes preferences that "Keep 
iTunes folder organised" is checked and also that "Copy files to iTunes 
Music folder is also checked". Finally find the MP3 files & drag & drop 
the lot of them into iTunes.

Reorganising your files becomes easiest if you don't have any 
playlists. In this case, just copy ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music from 
both machines to another location (like your desktop), quit iTunes and 
delete ~/Music/iTunes/ and all your iTunes preferences. Next time you 
start iTunes it should give you the opportunity to import all your 
music  from somewhere else, and you can point it at this folder & it'll 
import the lot, copying it into your new ~/Music/iTunes/ directory & 
organising it by artist / album. All artist / album / genre information 
will be retained, and of course you can do this with a folder 
containing all the songs from both machines & all external drives &c.

If you have a lot of playlists you've set up, then you might wish to 
try using the "Export Song Library" command & importing again into the 
other machine, but I can't say I've tried this.

Stroller.