Before leaving work yesterday, I turned on iTunes on my computer with the foolish expectation that when I got home it would be ready to play music right away, without me having to start it up (yes, I am that much of an anal retentive). The problem seems to have been that all my music was on my external hard drive, so the computer went back to the default folder. When I got home and plugged it in to the mac, iTunes started loading the library from the external HD again, but when it had finished, the main library was littered with those little exclamation marks that mean that it can't find where the songs are located. I flicked through and worked out about half were lost.
I wondered what to do and after a bit of searching on the web, saved my library file, deleted all the songs and then reloaded the library file. This time, it said something along the lines of "import successful, but some files could not be found". I looked down and the library had been reduced to about 11,000 tracks, about a third of what there should be. I searched the external HD in a panic, but there were about the right number of files there, so, for some reason, iTunes just can't find them...which is bloody annoying.
The only solution I have found, has meant deleting all my songs from iTunes, and then just dragging and dropping the iTunes library folder in iTunes again. It's worked and the library is back to an (unnecessary) 30,000 odd songs, but it has also deleted all my playlists and all the info about playtimes etc. Really, really annoying. I now have to go through and re-list about 200 odd album playlists. I could of course just not do it, but I wouldn't be able to look at the iTunes window without sweating or something else OCD.
I still have no idea why it may have happened in the first place, so I have no idea what to do to prevent it happening in the future? Anyone experienced anything similar? Probably...
A Message to Martin
Dear Martin,
As you didn't seem to put a real email address in the comment form, I don't have any other way of replying to you. Thats why you haven't had any reply from me until now. If you did put a real email address, the comment form must have had a problem, as there was no email address when I tried to reply to you. I have updated and rechecked the comment form plugin and it's working now.
Anyway, in answer to your question, please feel free to use the photo for your project. If you want a higher resolution copy, let me know and I would be happy to send one to you. Either way, it would be great to have a look at the finished version when you are done.
Hope that answers your questions,
Yours,
Olly