New computer- iPod problem

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My computer crashed. Dell replaced the motherboard and both harddrives. Fortunately, I had backed up recently — including the “My Music” folder. I have now reloaded everything, but I can’t get iTunes to work correctly. I have transferred the “My Music” folder from my backup drive to the C drive — but iTunes can’t find any of the music. I have a very limited amount of music on my iPod, so moving from the iPod to iTunes won’t save very much.

Does anyone have any suggestions? It’s very frustrating to be able to see it, yet not get to it!

Thanks.

Sheryl King
San Diego

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Hi Sheryl,

I have iTunes on my Mac. Checking the various options, I find I have an Import command on my File menu. Can you click that and browse to your music folder and then “import” them into iTunes?

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Sheryl,
Just transferring the My music folder to the C drive won’t “tell” the new system configuration that iTunes is there.
I think you will have to reinstall the music app in order for it to locate your backups.

I don’t use iTunes or iPods, so I’m not 100% on this.

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I have reinstalled iTunes several times and tried “importing” the music. Doesn’t work. In the course of all this, I discovered I’ve used 4 of my 5 “authorizations” from iTunes — all on this one stupid computer! It’s very frustrating!

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Sheryl – I am sorry you are having so much trouble with iTunes. I decided to try loading it on my PC to see what problems I would encounter. The install went as I expected – no problems. I have v 6.0.5 and Quicktime loaded along with it since it was included in the download.

After it completed, I opened it and it immediately searched my computer for songs. And from that point, I accessed my external drive to try the import function. That did not work as I expected so I took another try by going to iTune’s file menu/Add Folder to Library….chose the folder that had my music in it and said okay. That did the trick for me. Not sure why the difference between my Mac and the PC but I have music newly loaded and ready to play. I hope you get your application figured out! Life without music would be a dull thing!

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(Edited by JohnBF on 23-Aug-06 15:46. )

If you have music purchased from iTunes Music Store (iTMS) you may have run into the Digital Rights Management redistribution limits of iTunes, see apple.com/support/itunes/musicstore/authorization/.

Otherwise if it’s ripped CD files or other uncopyprotected media, first make sure that Edit | Preferences | Advanced | General tab “iTunes Music folder location” points to the correct place, and then as Skitterbug notes you should have no problems using File | Add folder to library.

Edit: sinjin‘s post reminded me that there should be a subfolder of your Music folder called (surprise) iTunes. On my PC it contains these files & folders:
iTunes Library.itl
iTunes Music Library.htm
iTunes Musicsubfolders containing WMA files which iTunes has converted to M4A files

However, I have not purchased any music from iTMS, so he may be correct that there should be other files related to iTMS purchases.

Post back if you don’t get this solved. (I may learn a thing or two!)

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There are two files within the itunes folder that tells it what music you purchased. You need to copy them over from your backup and replace the ones created with the new install. That will make it so you can sync with your ipod. I will have to check the names of those files as I do not use an ipod or itunes I helped two friends with the same problem.

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Well, I think I have figured it out — at least to a point I can live with. I had to delete all the music files on my C drive and uninstall iTunes. The I reinstalled iTunes. I figured out where it wanted the music to be (I think it was under My Music/iTunes/My iTunes Music or something similar. Then I moved all the music into that directory. I could not use “import from folder” because it wanted me to import each folder individually. Since iTunes had previously “organized” my music into individual folders for each artist, that would have been really tedious. So I simply copied them into the right directory. Then I opened up side by side windows of iTunes and the folder where the music was and dragged the folders over to “My Library” in iTunes. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds because I could select a bunch of directories at once and drag a whole bunch at a time. It took a while for iTunes to process them each time, but that’s what FreeCell is for! Once that was all accomplished, I used the “show duplicates” in iTunes to clean up any messes — well, some of the messes.

This didn’t, of course, copy my playlists. I only have two or three that matter. I simply sat at my computer with my iPod on (it still has the playlists in it, since I haven’t synced it yet) and played through the beginning of each song as I moved it into the playlist. This gave me a chance to correct any previous errors (“what on earth is THAT doing in my bedtime music playlist” for example!).

Since I had “authorized” this computer, the purchased music (which was a small percentage, actually), works OK.

Thanks for all the help. I couldn’t have gotten there without the nudging from the people who responded to me. No one gave me the “answer” but they gave me info that caused me to think of things to try that ultimately led to the answer.

There is probably a much better way to do this, but I’m through messing with it, and it works OK for me.

Hope this info helps someone else!

Sheryl King
La Jolla

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