Comments on: I Curse You, iTunes

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 05:23:27 +0000

After an ages of hunting down the solution to this problem I found it here: http://hifiblog.com/past/2006/05/11/howto-move-your-itunes-music-while-preserving-library-data-when-you-dont-let-itunes-manage-your-music-library/

I think the article on the above link will fix the issue(s) mentioned above.

All except for one that is. I had the same problem above trying to open the .itl file. Notepad couldn’t do it because it was too large I guess? My computer kept locking up. I ended up going to download.com and grabbing “Boxer.exe” (a text editor). I dont’ think it matters which text editor you get, as long as you’re using something more powerful than Notepad (assuming you have a really large .itl file like I do). Anyways, after getting a better text editor (i dind’ thave to buy it or anything) I was able to follow the instructions on the link above and all appears to be well in the universe again.

By: sogrady

sogrady — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 19:11:00 +0000

matt m: tried this, and unfortunately my playlists seem not to have survived. no idea why. i’ve done the manual drive letter replace dance before, though, and that worked fine.

James: i may be a unique case here, because i’ve tried pretty much everything suggested and nothing’s worked yet. most unfortunate.

By: James Governor

James Governor — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 12:09:07 +0000

i am pretty sure Jerome ran into that bug a couple of times - his library would suddently disappear. problem is he is on vacation to brazil for a month. if only he had blogged it… he had to reset one file i believe… it was a somewhat straightforward fix once he worked it out. but not being an itunes head i didnt pay full attention.

By: matt m

matt m — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 05:19:36 +0000

When I changed the drive letter of the network share where I keep my mp3s, I just renamed the .itl file, started up iTunes and then picked File…Import and pulled in the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file that was living in the same directory as the .itl. Playlists survived. (note- i did a search and replace on the xml file to change the drive mappings while itunes was closed, but that doesn’t really apply to your case)

This is with the latest iTunes and WinXP.

The little bugger is takes forever determining gapless playback information on my 17000 tunes. It takes ages to do that to a network drive, even though it’s on a gigabit switch to the server. I couldn’t get it to complete on my laptop over wifi- I had to plug it in.

Nearly as annoying is that the ipod itself kept taking the same drive letter as my network share, which is why I had to change the drive mapping.