Moved my iTunes library to a new computer - library showing titles and not locating files

Moving things around by hand tends to cause problems. iTunes may be able to fix things itself if it knows things are broken, you repair a single track by repointing the library at it, and there is some simple systematic change that applies to all other broken paths to fix those. Alternatively you can put the content back at the path that it used to be at when the library worked. This can be done by comparing the current path to a file and the one that iTunes "thinks" it is at when you look on the Song Info (ctrl+i) > File tab, and working out the correct cut/copy & paste operation. I can help with that. Or you can try my relinking script. Unless you can go back to the original working library on another computer, or a backup of the same. There is no one answer, what you need to do depends on what you've done to break things and what options are available to undo the damage. The information that would help me most help you are these details as requested earlier:

1. The location of the media folder under Edit > Preferences > Advanced
2. The location of a sample missing track shown under Song Info > File > Location that begins file://localhost/
3. The true path to the file whose details you gave in 2

If you don't care about your ratings, play counts, playlists, .wav metadata, or anything else not captured in tags then you can always start over by importing the media you have into an empty library, but I assume that isn't the route you want to go down.

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The "missing file" issue with exclamation marks happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, one of its parent folders, or the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter, or you've moved a non-portable library to a different path (see Make a split library portable for details). It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place, or that you've been too aggressive when deleting duplicates. See Getting iTunes & Windows Media Player to play nicely if you're trying to access your media with any other media players.

Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to Get Info, then click No when asked to try to locate the track. Look on the file tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, a folder renamed, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. If the difference between the two paths is an additional Music folder in one path then this is a layout issue. I can explain further if that is the case. If everything is where it is supposed to be try Repair security permissions for iTunes for Windows.

In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info, or when playing a track, but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. Although it says something like "use the same location" I think it expects to find the tracks in the same artist & album layout they were in previously, with one systematic change to the path.

If another application like Windows Media Player has moved/renamed the files, or the library has been moved from OS X to Windows, then the chances are that subtle differences in naming strategies will make it hard to restore the media to the precise path that iTunes is expecting. In such cases, as long as the missing files can be found somewhere, you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes. See this post for an explanation of how it works. It might need some tweaking if your media is in a non-standard layout.

If you want me to try to provide specific advice please post back the following details:

1. The location of the media folder under Edit > Preferences > Advanced
2. The location of a sample missing track shown under Get Info > File > Location that begins file://localhost/
3. The true path to the file whose details you gave in 2

Note the addition of file://localhost/ (and the flipped direction of slashes in Windows) is normal for a file that isn't quite where iTunes is expecting to find it.

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You cannot add artwork to tracks in .wav format, or that don't currently have an attached tag. Depending on how they were generated MP3 files, for example, may only have audio data without any tag information. (There is also an obscure issue where multiple tags can be added to MP3 files, which iTunes may update unpredictably.) When you can add artwork it is done using the Song Info dialog (ctrl+i) on the artwork tab. See your other thread - iTunes as a metadata editor - Apple Community - for more on issues updating metadata.

iTunes manages the Album Artwork cache and the .itc2 files inside it. There is nothing for you to do in that respect.

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The .tmp files can be thrown away. They are briefly generated and removed as iTunes saves updates to the library. Their existence suggests iTunes or the computer crashed at the point the library was being updated. If you have third-party AV software it may help to exclude the iTunes folder from any real-time AV scanning. The Album Artwork folder (in the same folder as the active .itl file) normally contains a bunch of nested subfolders that at the bottom contain .itc2 files which are the cached thumbnails used by the library.

iTunes doesn't generate .jpg images. Windows Explorer and Windows Media Player may create .jpg images in each album folder that contains audio files that have embedded artwork. I don't know why you might have another folder of artwork images. Did you install Apple Music for Windows at any point?

There should be an Automatically Add to iTunes folder in the active iTunes Media folder. The one in the iTunes folder is there because it has been incorrectly designated as the media folder at some point. You can throw that one away.

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Lost & Found playlists

Create a playlist called Found, select everything in Music and drag it into the Found playlist. Create a smart playlist called Lost matching All the rules Playlist is Music and Playlist is not Found. Your lost tracks will be in this playlist.

If the files exist on the computer my FindTracks script may be able to help reconnect iTunes to them. If you post the three details I asked for in my post to this thread I may be able to understand what has happened and perhaps suggest a better approach to repairing the broken links.

tt2

You can try repairing just the lost tracks with my FindTracks script. Point it at your media folder and see if it can detect and relink the missing files. If the general layout matches what iTunes would normally do in terms of character replacements, limiting file and folder names to 40 characters, etc. then the script usually works well.

Or you can edit the hidden preferences file in your media folder .iTunes Preferences.plist with Notepad and change the layout value from 1 to 0, which means that iTunes won't add the extra \Music folder between the media folder and the (album) artist folder when checking for the track. Making this change shouldn't break any existing links that work. Best to backup the .itl file first just in case you need to walk this change back however.

Failing either of those approaches you could simply import the entire media folder to the library, which only adds in the tracks that are not already on paths known to the library, then use another of my scripts, DeDuper, to deduplicate the library, removing just one of each set of duplicate tracks from the library while retaining or merging ratings, play counts, playlist membership, etc. If there are two tracks, one of which is missing, and one which isn't, then the script can reduce that down to a single working entry.

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I use a USB disk for iTunes media. On any new machine I open iTunes using the shift key and iTunes will ask for the location of the itunes ITL file. The library is already present on the hard disk but I check options to be sure the library location is correct and change it if needed.

Moving the media library to a new location is trivial, drag and drop. Then open the ITL file as before when done.

A rich boy might have a NAS box and that can hold more music than a hard disk.

To group the tracks in the Lost playlist use View > View As > Songs and then tap the heading of the Album column to first sort on it, then if needs be tap once or twice more until it reads Album by Artist.

If everything is in the wrong layout, or it is everything in <Media Folder>/<Artist> folders, then you select all of the Artist folders inside <Media Folder> making sure not to select the following:

• Audiobooks
• Automatically Add to Music
• Movies
• Podcasts
• TV Shows
• Voice Memos
• and anything else that might be non-artist folders

Then cut (ctrl-x), browse to <Media Folder>\Music, and paste (ctrl-v).

If you need to be a bit more surgical about it, which you might be able to tell after studying the Lost playlist, then you can work through the content carefully moving what you want to fix in appropriate batches.

I'd suggest going into Edit > Preferences > Advanced and turning off Keep... and Copy... while you're fixing things, just to stop iTunes moving things around any further while you are doing this. They can go back on later once the library is reconnected to everything. In particular, as mentioned elsewhere, you want to avoid anything that might cause files in .wav format to be reevaluated and moved losing potentially meaningful data in the file path.

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When we set it up, we dragged the folder we stored the music in over the iTunes window and dropped it in.