Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia iTunes, iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV iTunes forgets where the songs are...

I'm using iTunes 8.2.1 (6), and very often, after having plugged in my external hd so Time Machine can do its thing, iTunes will be unable to locate entire albums, even though the Library location (on the internal hd) hasn't changed. at one time, many months ago, I did have my iTunes Library on the external, so I thought maybe iTunes was mistakenly switching it, but the iTunes prefs still show the internal Library location.

I have not noticed this problem if I don't have the ext hd running. I will try a reboot of the MacBook and reopen iTunes (without mounting the ext) and see what I get, as soon as I'm done listening to some more Gerry Rafferty...

the ext hd is a 500Gb FW/USB I purchased from OWC.

this is a very frustrating thing to have to deal with, as there is no way that I know to "locate" multiple songs at the same time. I have tried Resetting the Library, and Changing it and re-adding the Internal, but no joy. I have it set to Keep the Music Folder oraganized, and also to Copy Files to iTunes Music.

anybody else seen this problem?

I'd suggest running a disk repair app or even disk utility.

also try rebuilding your library.

thanks, Virtual.

I tried rebuilding the Library, no luck. I tried a couple of AppleScripts/Automater things I found, and nothing worked. so I found this Apple Support article and trashed the Library.xml. iTunes still couldn't find the songs, though they were right there.

so I went hardcore, and trashed the .xml, etc., again, unchecked Copy Songs in the iTunes prefs, and just dragged all the albums back into iTunes. it means I need to re-create my playlists, but I mostly use Smart Playlists, and they all need culling anyway. so, I'm back in business.

I did do some other maintenance however, as you suggested, and I think there may be some weirdness going on somewhere. Disk Utility was giving me a beachball when I ran Verify Disk, though eventually it would complete, if I left it, saying the disk was fine. so I pulled out the Apple Hardware Disk and ran that, which also gave me a clean bill of health.

anyway, with Snow Leopard on the way, I'll keep tabs on what's happening, and wait it out.

Given your results (and a few hours downtime) I would be tempted to run Tech Tool Pro 5's 'Check Computer' and DiskWarrior to rebuild the directory.

One thing to remember is when you move your iTunes Library to another location (to external, network, anywhere else) and point iTunes Preferences to the new location you then have to go back to iTunes, go to the menu item "File" and in the drop-down will be the word "Library" and then choose "Consolidate Library". This will clear out a lot of potential problems when moving and iTunes Music Library.