Helluva Hello!
Was hoping to find some assistance…ItUnes—
IMO- Itunes is Proprietary dog poop!
I have an mp3 collection from cd’s/media I own, of over 15,000 256mp3’s, including live recordings (legal).
6 years of collecting!
I have a home network with 6 pc’s/laptops.
I was gifted an iphone 3gs. Nice toy
I installed itunes 10 on my main laptop (win7 64 tosh) and pointed the library to my mp3 directory.
I have always stored my mp3’s on an internal 2 tb sata drive installed on an XP pro tower (never has had itunes installed on it).
Once itunes has been installed on laptop, I now have NO access, by any means, other than itunes show file in explorer…
at first I thought it deleted all my files, the directories where there
with any jgp’s and such, just no mp3’s…
I finally right clicked the main mp3 folder/ properties,
to find files size 100+ gb’s still in the mp3 directory.
I freaked for a couple hours, cussed for a few more hours, spent more hours trudging the inet for answers (Finding this wonderful forum)
finally went to apple store to have only solution offered by pea brained store clerks, was to buy a MAC.
How do I regain access to my legally owned property that itunes refuses me?
Thank you for any HELP!
I just now realized this is year old post… my newbie is showin
We like thread titles to be descriptive here (and it gets you better answers), so I changed the title from “forum & thread hello” to “iTunes/iPhone help: library lost?”
Please expand on this. How did you “point the library?” Did you tell iTunes to import those files, or did you go into preference and tell iTunes to write it’s library file over top of your mp3 directory? If you imported, there was a clearly marked checkbox asking if you wanted iTunes to move the files into the library, which it sounds like you did. Just get them back from there.
In any case, if you can still get to the files via “show in explorer”, just do that, navigate up a couple levels, and move them somewhere else. iTunes does not have magical explorer access, it’s the same explorer you can navigate to on your own. Just look at the address bar in the explorer window and it’ll tell you where they are.
iTunes organizes your files by moving them all in a folder. You can turn this off or change it, but I’m betting you haven’t.
The files are located in “My Documents,” “My Music” (omit the “my” if you’re using Windows Vista or 7), “iTunes,” “iTunes Music.”
If you want to put these back into your old folder, go into the iTunes Preferences in iTunes and go to “Advanced.” Change the default folder and make sure “Let iTunes organize your files” is checked. The files will be copied back to where they were.
I believe iTunes copies the files, not move them. So the original files should be intact.
However, my recollection is that this is not the default behavior. If you haven’t changed the settings, the iTunes “library” is just an index pointing to the original files.
There are preference settings that adjust this behavior.
If none of the other suggestions work, you can always fire up iTunes, get a fresh (empty) library, and tell it to import the folder where your files live. That will lose the ratings and playlists–and it’s rather slow–but it works well.
Seems like your question has been answered, so I just wanted to ask: So the only place these files exist is on your HD? :dubious:
Why do you not have at least one backup? Hard drives can and will fail. I only have around 4,000 mp3’s, and they’re all ripped from my own cd’s, but I have 2 sets of dvd backups. Why 2 backups? Well dvd’s can fail too, and it would probably take me a couple months to re-rip all of them given the amount of spare time I have right now.