Make all iTunes music available to iPhoto2/iMovie3

Feb 21, '03 09:03:00AM

Contributed by: srcleaves

I was so excited for iMovie 3.0 and the Ken Burns Effect. I'm working on a very large project involving over 200 photos and it has made a huge difference to be able to pan and zoom still photos easily. I was also excited about the integration between iTunes and the other iLife apps. But when it came time to select music for my movie I was surprised to find that not even half my library was available to me. Out of 2996 songs, I was seeing only 1098 in iMovie.

A little bit of poking around in the iTunes Library and corresponding XML file led me to the problem. I have my MP3s stored on a separate partition. At some point I changed the name of the partition. For some reason all the songs imported before the name change still had references to the old partition name in both iTunes library files. They were available in iTunes just fine, but not in either iPhoto or iMovie.

First I tried the Consolidate functionality in iTunes. This appeared to do nothing, and didn't solve the problem. Then I hoped someone else might have already written an app to fix this, but I could find nothing on Version Tracker that fit the bill. I tried playing around with the XML file, but this didn't fix the Library file.

So in the end I moved the iTunes files to a safe location and ran iTunes. Since the files were gone, it assumed I had no music. I then used the Add to Library function and selected all the MP3s in my music directory. It added and organized all the music. Of course I lost my Playlists, but I didn't feel that was much of a problem. The important thing is that all the music is now available in iPhoto and iMovie. I created some new Playlists, which I figure has the benefit of getting me to listen to some music I might have been ignoring.

[robg adds: I haven't experienced this problem, but forcing iTunes to recreate the library certainly seems like it should resolve the issue.]

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