Here’s the situation:
A month ago or so, noticing that the HD on my imac was nearly full, I moved my itunes music and photo archivefolders to an external drive (a WD book). That meant that itunes ran directly from the external drive.
It ran like a dog. With no legs.
It wasn’t great. Every time I started iTunes up, the drive went chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga and spent a while thinking about it all. I considered moving it all back to the main drive, but before I could do so…
…I opened iTunes up one evening and got a message that the music library wasn’t valid and so had been replaced by a new one and the old one renamed “damaged”.
So I thought the best thing would be to move all the music files back to the main drive - that took a little over 22 hours to process - and then I’d be able to remap iTunes to find the library on the main drive.
Now, I’ve followed the instructions on all sorts of sites about restoring from the music library XML file, and no dice. It doesn’t work.
So I tried just adding the music via a normal route, and that worked no problem, except there appears to be loads of music missing.
In fact, when I look at it, it’s not just standard files missing, but crucially, files bought from itunes including music and TV shows (which still exist as files but for some reason can’t be readded to iTunes).
And all my podcast subscriptions seem to have vamoosed, too, which is immensely irritating.
So here’s my question: I haven’t plugged my ipod back in since this happened. Is there any chance that I can restore all my playlists and metadata and podcasts and things from there?
Any help or suggestions that anyone can provide would be very much appreciated, because it’s driving me bonkers.
I use iPod access to get everything off my iPod. With the paid version it will copy over all of your playlists, which is excellent. Just did this for a friend–copied from iPod to Mac and it worked great.
I used Senuti two or three years ago to restore my music, podcasts and playlists from my iPod to my Mac. It worked just fine, but I can’t remember whether it also restored play counts and other metadata. (I had a good backup copy of the library file from my old hard disk, so I think I used that to restore the metadata, though at this remove I can’t remember precisely how I did it.) The rather sparse documentation at the Senuti site makes no mention of managing metadata, so I suspect that it doesn’t restore that data.
iPodRip and iPod.iTunes both claim to allow you to transfer metadata back and forth as well as music files, but I have no personal experience of those programs.
As a new comer to the world of iTunes and iPod’s, I shall follow this discussion keenly. It’ll be interesting to discover how safe my music is on my iPod, should my computer commit suicide.
Thanks for raising this curious issue :-)
This is probably largely not helpful, but:
- Your podcasts are definitely gone, according to everything I have ever read.
- The only truly trouble free recoveries I know of are where you have an uncorrupted original library file - Itunes (on Windows anyway) only makes a copy of this itself when you upgrade the software. So that’s the one to put on a daily backup. Mine has now reached 12mb, which is worrying.
- I’m *sure*, as Jen suggests, there are ways (more than one) of restoring your music from the Ipod, but never having done it, and not owning a Mac, I’m not exactly best placed to advise you on software.
(William T also wishes Apple would rewrite much of the code that has caused iTunes to crawl along at the speed you describe on fast PCs since version 7.6…)
Hi,
I had a similar snaffoo which was totally my fault. 100Gb of music on an external hard drive which for some reason I’d thought would be totally safe on the top of a subwoofer speaker. Then whilst playing some game or other the bass was loud enough to rattle the enclosure off the top (whilst powered up) and fell to the floor resulting in the scritch scratch kerplung of a destroyed drive. 17,000 songs down the swanny. However, my solution was this.
Create a new Itunes library (without deleting the old one) and then download and buy Ipod Access and copy everything from my 60Gb Gen 4 ipod and 16gb ipod touch. The thing about Ipod Access is that you can set it to not just copy your tunes back from your ipod but add them straight into Itunes, including podcasts and playlists. You can set it to ignore duplicates too. So although I’m short by about 25gb I haven’t lost too much and just need to sit down and re-rip everything.
The other reason for keeping the old xml file was that I could load that library, create a special playlist to list all the missing songs and then create a separate database of all the things I’d really like to get back.
To find out which songs are missing, create a new playlist, name it something like ‘live’, highlight all the songs in your library and drag them into this new playlist. Then create a smart playlist which has the rule ‘Playlist is not Live’(or whatever you called the other playlist).
As for the purchased songs which are missing, if you drop apple a line they can arrange for you to redownload the purchased songs to the authorised computer you bought them from.
Hope that helps.
Simon
Do you still have the corrupted files? Both the XML and the itl one?
Sometimes you can persuade it to restore by deleting the itl one and forcing a rebuild from the XML.
Ping me, send over any xml you have and I’ll see if there’s anything salvageable?
The itunes store stuff - has your machine de-authorised itself?
(Learnt the hard way - I’ve lost my collection to laCie hard drive failure TWICE. I’d look at TimeMachine, possibly…)
I have had this problem. It was a horrible problem.
What happened to me was that when stuff went to the external hard drive (which was formatted FAT32 so windows could use it) it cut all the file names down to the maximum size for FAT32, which is 32 characters. All songs and albums with names longer than 32 got truncated, so they no longer matched up with what was in the XML file.
This sucked, but the music was still there.
Not sure if this could be what’s happened to you.
Aquarion, where did you get the idea that FAT32 filenames have a cap at 32 characters?
FAT32 strictly has an 8.3 filename, but in practice it uses LFN (long filenames) — a trick to store extra entries in the FAT to store longer filenames. LFN accepts up to 255 character filenames.
So I’ll accept 8.3, or 255, but I don’t know where 32 came from.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#FAT32