Find missing files in iTunes 10

Sep 08, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robindwilliams

I recently had a hard drive failure and had to resort to a backup of iTunes. However, iTunes couldn't find many tracks, as it was still looking for them on the old drive.

Despite manually editing the library files, I couldn't get iTunes to look on my new drive for the several hundred files it had mistakenly misplaced. The only way was to play each one, wait for it to not find the drive and then use the 'Locate' button to find each file.

iTunes 10 has what I can only assume is a new feature, whereby if you use the 'Locate' feature to find a missing file, a dialog box then asks if you would like to use the information to find other missing files. Straight away it found all of the other missing files. Hurrah!

This may not be new functionality, but in all of the times I've used the 'Locate' button, I've never seen this dialog box. This is functionality that has existed in Apple's pro applications such as Logic for years, so I'm glad they've finally added it to iTunes.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. Searching the web found some other more complicated methods for doing this, but this one is very straightforward. I'm sure if it's not new somebody will mention that.]

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