nickphillips

I recently bought an external harddrive and moved all of my music onto it in order to enhance performance. But now my playlists are gone when I open itunes. I found my music but there are like three of every song and there is no organization. I know I must have done something wrong but what could it be. Is there any way to fix it? Please don't tell me that all of that time I spent organizing my music has gone down the drain. Oh yeah I also tried to restore my computer numerous times but it doesn't seem to help. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

sinclair_tm

well, you did kinda of mess things up by copying the folder to the drive. the best way to move the itunes library is to goto menu 'itunes>preferences...'. then click on the 'advanced' icon. there click on the button 'change' under 'itunes music folder location'. now navigate to the external drive and select the folder you want your music to be in. now make sure that you have the boxes next to 'keep itunes music folder organized' and 'copy files to itunes music folder when adding to library' checked. now click the 'ok' button. itunes may or may not start moving the music to the hard drive. if it does, wait till its done. now goto menu 'advanced>consolidate library...'. click the 'consolidate' button and it will now finish moving everything to the external drive. now this will only move the music files. your playlist files will still be in the itunes folder in the music folder in your home directory. if you deleted that folder after copying it to the external drive, then thats why your playlists are gone, and the best thing is to start the playlists over again. if you have duplicate songs now in your library, goto menu 'edit>show duplicate songs' and itunes will list all the songs that have the same name and there you can delete the copies. remember that itunes is designed to work best if you let it organize the files, and you do all your working with the files in the itunes interface.

--EDIT-- the instructions i just gave are for the mac. is your itunes win xp or mac os x? it does make a difference.

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uptownshopgirl

Hello! I am currently on my second Ipod. The reason is because when I connect my Ipod to my Itunes, in this instance today I did it to charge my Ipod, anyway when it was connected I got a message asking me if I wanted to upgrade and I clicked on yes. Well, once it started to upgrade all of my music was erased from both Itunes library and my Ipod. My contacts and calendar are still on it but no music. HELP!

PS: I did try to restore my computer in hopes of locating the missing files.

Thanks,

Abby