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Locate lots of iTunes track file locations

Recent switch to new computer orphaned several hundred MP3 files. Moves were between network and local drives. And some were from one media directory to another on the same drive.


Ran turingtest2’s excellent findtracks.vbs script and grabbed a bunch of them. But a few hundred are not being recognized by the script. Even when I point it at the directories where the files are located, the script can’t find them.


I checked the directory permissions, confirmed none are blocked, and no media files or directories are read-only. I am the administrator on this machine, locally and on my local domain, so permissions should not be a problem. Not sure where to go from here, since I can’t sync my library without wiping a lot of media from my devices.


Would anyone have any thoughts on how to find the source of this problem?

Windows, Windows 10

Posted on Nov 19, 2024 7:28 PM

Reply
4 replies

Nov 22, 2024 8:40 AM in response to turingtest2

Yes I can. Have a few items that appear to be typical of what’s going on:


iTunes music item (shown as missing):


file://localhost/U:/x/My Music/Steve Perry - Street Talk/Steve Perry - Street Talk - 04 - Foolish Heart.mp3


Drive U was replaced about a year ago. Some parts of the collection on that drive were given a new home on drive C, like this one (as Windows shows):


C:\My Music\Steve Perry - Street Talk\Steve Perry - Street Talk - 04 - Foolish Heart.mp3


This item is one of 10. All are “missing.” This collection of 10 cuts have been in my library for quite some time, tags populated are song, artist, album, album artist, genre, year, track#, and disc#. I don’t usually populate all those fields, but some program I used a while back was doing that.


Here’s another example but with only song, artist, genre, year, and bpm fields populated:


iTunes:


file://localhost/U:/x/My Music/Starship-We Built This City (2).mp3


Windows:


C:\My Music\Starship-We Built This City (2).mp3



Same problem again with a similar cut:


file://localhost/U:/x/My Music/Starship-We Built This City.mp3

and:

C:\My Music\Starship-We Built This City.mp3


Those two cuts are not dupes, but different released versions of the same original song.


Looking at all the “lost” tracks in iTunes, most of these have track # assigned. But the “found” tracks also have a fair number of track# assigned. Not seeing yet what is common to most or all of the “missing” tracks that refused to be “found.”

Nov 22, 2024 12:07 PM in response to Traveler22

Thanks, I see the issue. My script is primarily expecting a conventional iTunes layout of:

<Media Folder>\<AlbumArtist>\<Album>\[D-]## <Name>.<Ext>


It has some flexibility, but your first example parses as something like:

<Media Folder>\<AlbumArtist> - <Album>\<AlbumArtist> - <Album> - ## - <Name>.<Ext>


Which it isn't going to cope with as it stands, and iTunes is also going to fail to locate files on such a path. I'm busy this evening but hopefully I can find some time over the weekend to add some additional code to match your naming conventions.


The other patterns shown translate as:

<Media Folder>\<AlbumArtist>-<Name>[ (2)].<Ext>


If you can identify any others that would be useful.


tt2

Locate lots of iTunes track file locations

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