ITunes and Moving Drives

ITunes and Changing Drive Letters

ITunes doesn't seem to like it at all when your music moves around. I think things are a bit more complicated for me, in part, because I wasn't entirely sold on iTunes and the iPod when I first got started. Way back when, I created mp3 files out of all of my CD's and I had gone through the trouble of organizing them the way I wanted them.

It Already Happened

I've seen many tutorials on the web for moving your itunes files off to a new drive, but they don't seem to account for the possibility that the files may have moved already. It's not a possibility for me to put my files back on the same drive letter in the same location only to move them once again. That would involve moving gigabytes of files multiple times and setting up the drives. Too much of a pain in the but.

Step 1 - Back Up Files

There are two files to be concerned with - in my case, the files where in My Documents\My Music\iTunes

The files are named: iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml

Close iTunes, disconnect your ipod and back those files up. Twice during this process, I made mistakes and I found that restoring these files and then starting up itunes, the application returned to it's original state.

Step 2 - Export Library

I found my Itunes Library.xml file, but I also found in going through this process that it wasn't entirely up to date. I exported my library to a new .xml file in order to proceed.

Step 3 - Delete Files

Now that you have your library exported, close iTunes again and delete your iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml files. The next time you start iTunes, you will have nothing in any of your music folders.

Step 4 - Edit the Export File

To edit my Export File, I used UltraEdit - which has a free 30 day trial if you don't have anything handy to get this accomplished. It is a simple matter of doing a global search and replace in the file - I changed the text H:/music to T:/disk2/music.

Step 5 - Import The Library

Open ITunes, Choose Import from the file menu, and select your exported and edited xml file. At this point, all of your music should be available. For me, since the files are on a network shared drive, the music won't be available unless I'm actually logged in and can see files in explorer on the drive.

Step 6 - The Aftermath

I didn't just stop using iTunes when my music wasn't available. I bought more music. When I imported the library, it did import some of my purchased music, but it did not import all of it. It turns out I had multiple locations for my itunes music - one on my c: drive and one on another drive. I found the one with the missing music and just imported that folder.

Conclusion

There really should be an easier way to do things than searching for files and editing xml. Apple has really missed the ball on this one. Until they come around to making it easier, following these steps should work for you. There are no guarantees, so back up those files in step 1. If you are having problems making it work, close iTunes, recover your backup files, and then restart iTunes.

I haven't connected my iPod just yet, but I imagine it will have to re-sync everything all over again.

My artwork has all sustained itself through the change. The only thing I have noticed that is missing are my podcast subscriptions. The podcasts are all there though, so it was actually nice to have to re-subscribe (just one click) to each podcast. It allowed me to weed out all the things I really don't care for anymore.

Talk About ITunes and Moving Drives