So let’s see. Where do I start this fun little adventure. I have an external hard drive that’s something like 160 gigs and I decided that I’d store all my music on there so I could take it to and fro (though I have yet to take it to nor fro in the six months I’ve had it, it just stays hooked up to my pc). Yesterday I finally got back home from nearly dying for a week and decided that I wanted to listen to some tunes. So I open up iTunes and realize that I’d formatted my computer just before I’d left for my trip to various hospitals. No big deal, I’ll just re-add my music folder. I add a folder and only my music from artists a - ba appear. Huh, must be this new iTunes. Manually go to folder - HOLY CRAP. All my music is actually gone.
Lame. But fixable. I’ll just get everything off my iPod. So I turn on my iPod this morning so I can use iPod Agent to get all the goods. I reset my iPod a couple of times because I basically have to do that 20 times a day because I get the sad iPod logo. Well this time in a cruel twist of fate it erases all my music. That’s it, 3500 songs are gone. I am absolutely devestated, it took me many years and many dollars to get all that music and now it’s just gone. I have a lot of it in CD’s that I can rerip the but CD’s are hundreds of miles away and I just don’t want to rip that much music again.
iTunes shows my iPod as still having all the space taken up from the previous songs but it doesn’t see the songs either.
So is there anything I can do or am I just absolutely horribly screwed.
No it wasn’t devoted entirely to the music. That’s the weird thing, all my other files are in tact entirely, I’ve got like 50 gigs of other files and they’re all fine. It’s just that one folder that got beat up.
Yeah 3500 songs is between 15 and 20gb, I have the same amount and it takes up 18gb.
You said iTunes says theres space taken up so perhaps it’s not actually deleted the songs, try doing this:
(i’m assuming your on a PC).
Open an explorer window (double click on My Computer or something). Go Tools > Folder Options then click the view tab and enable the ‘View Hidden Files and Folders’ button thingy.
Now go to yer iPod using My Computer. Double click on it to explore the files. There should be a folder called iPod_Control, open that, then double click on Music. If it’s all there, there should be a ton of folders called like F01, F02 etc…
That’s basically all your music. However, the way iPods index the music sorts it like this, so you need to just transfer everything to your PC, then drag it into iTunes and it should add it all back.
Yeah there’s a ton of options out there, they all suck equally I’m sure. I’m going to try going in manually here in a bit, I’ll report my failure at that time
They are all still there, it’s just the XML that indexes them is messed up. To clean this up, drag the itunes music library file onto the itunes app. You will lose your album structure, but your songs will all be in the library.
I just want to put this disclaimer out there for all who read this:
[SIZE=4][COLOR=black]NEVER GO IN YOUR ITUNES LIBRARY, THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO IN THERE. EVERYTHING CAN BE DONE THROUGH THE APP. [/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE=4][/SIZE]
[SIZE=4]BY GOING IN THAT FOLDER, YOU CANNOT DO ANY GOOD, ONLY HARM.[/SIZE]
Yeah do that thing with the View Hidden Files and Folders thing, and you should see a bunch of folders with weird ash name MP3’s in them. Just use Music Brainz to ID3tag and rename them (and you’d better hope they are in MP3’s cause that’s the only thing Music Brainz supports).
