iTunes - restore troubles

[[AK]Hylander]

Unless I'm misunderstanding your question - you probably have all your songs listed with a '!' on them, correct?

If so, you should be able to point to the new directory for location and it should automatically pick up those songs. If you just add the new folder and drive letter, you will end up with duplicates which you will have to manually delete.

Unless you have a specific reason not to, can't you just start with a blank iTunes music list (delete everything) and then just add 'folder' which will automatically re-import all your music, albums, etc? I've done this several times and iTunes does it rather easily.

[[AK]Clay]

Thank you gentlemen, I'll try these tonight. The problem was that since the drive letter had changed, simply pointing to the new path under advanced properties was not working. And importing the library database file was not working either, I'm guessing because it had the old drive letter in all the file paths.

[[AK]StitchJones]

Doing what Hylander suggested worked in older versions of ITunes 4.4(previous). The steps I listed are what needs to be done with the newest version to get it working again. Embedded database pointers are such a pain. But in terms of a smooth flowing database catalog it's wonderful when working.

[Slaughter]

Should be able to go in iTunes menu Edit>Preferences then go to the Advanced tab and change the drive letter in the iTunes media folder location.

Not sure if that would result in duplicates or not, though.

That said, Stitch probably has the best idea for getting around duplicates.

[[AK]StitchJones]

Good point on the duplicates Slaughter. The last thing you want is a 18,000 song database to become 36,000 with duplicates.

[[AK]Clay]

This was not successful. None of my music library is shown in the Music tab. Interestingly, all of my music playlists are noted, however they are all now empty.

I suspect the drive letter is the problem, since itunes.xml has the wrong address.

Slaughters suggestion did not help, as that directory does not exist. There is iTunes Music and Library, but there is no iTunes Media directory

One thing I was hoping for, was that all of my Outlook information would be repopulated from my iPhone upon syncing back with iTunes. However, it's beginning to look like that's not going to happen.

[[AK]Clay]

To add, opening up the .xml file in a text edititor and doing a change/all F:/ to J:/ works pretty good though!

I'm more than a little bothered about the "completely resync" issue though, since I have a LOT of contacts in my outlook directory that are about to get hosed. Is there an alternative way to extract my "Contacts" from my iPhone to get them backed up into the computer. iTunes is going to wipe them when I resync.

Time to jailbreak? Won't I lose all that if I do that too though?

Aha! Fixed it. Turns out, you can restore your Outlook info from a iPhone. Sweet!