Be Excellent To Each Other

i ported my music over to the laptop of the missus via way of an external hard drive.

Unfortunately, the music was copied into iTunes from the HD, and thusly when said drive was disconnected, it vanished.

Folders were subsequently copied over, and all the music is now there. Sadly, so are about 2000 blank files with a "!" next to them, indicating that they are blank and cannot be found.

There must be a way to remove all these in one go. I'm sure I have done this before, but don't know how.

Anyone?

What I did was Ctrl-A - delete

Then import music from folder to the new empty library.

Worked a treat, may have one or two that are repeated, but it works alot better than having to trundle through finding each track

Alas, there was already a bundle of music on there, so I didn't want to delete that too.

Apparently you can use this

Assuming you're using a pc. If you're using a mac then there's some applescript that will do the job.

Edit - which is here, just in case any mac users are cursing my name.

Isn't there something clever you could do with a smart playlist? "WHRERE location IS f:\", for example, if f:\ was the external drive you've removed. That's if there is a Location thingy in iTunes's smart playlist dialog. I don't have a copy on this PC to check.

I shall have a look at both of those when I get home.

Cheers, fellas.

It doesnt actually delete the file, just removes it from the library.
Then you can bring everything back in if you know where it is

Can you not just import the XML from the old computer, thereby writing over the '!'s with the existing metadata?

Too lazy to find where she put it.

Also, to the other suggestion - way too complicated.

Right click - get info.

That tells you where it is

More importantly, get off your fat arse and fix the problem, rather than waiting for us to come up with the magic "Zero-effort-from-Curiosity" solution.


(I say this in full knowledge that Mogwai has an account to read this).

This^
It's not as if you can waste your evening playing CoD4 tonight due to the xbox live downtime. So might aswell do something useful!

For every song? Get out of town.

I was perfectly happy with the solution outlined in the first two replies to the thread (well, the 3rd and 4th actually, but...). The only reason the problem remains is that her computer is in the flat and I'm at work. I can hardly get the job done from here!

Well no.
Most of them will probably be in an itunes folder within music.

And the rest in a downloads folder if thats where you got them from.

Then just import the whole music folder and it should work.

That's what I did, and it worked fine

Link?