[fat mac moron]

Ok, bought a new firewire drive over the weekend to hold my ever-expanding (legal) music collection Anyway, I moved all the files over to the firewire drive and iTunes couldn't find the files so I did a restore from a backup... (Don't ask, I corrupted the original iTunes file!) The backup was about a month old, and I used TextEdit to change the relevant info in the iTunes Library XML file, but I'm sure some files are missing from my library...

Is there a way I can do a recursive 'ls' from my music directory and redirect it into a plain text file and then do a library export from iTunes and diff the 2 files? Any thoughts on this?

[geekwagon]

I'm sure this would be possible to do. You could use the find command to get a list of files under a current directory:

Code:
# cd ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library
# find . -name "*.mp3" > mp3files.txt

The problem that you now run into is that the locations in iTunes xml file contains URL encodings, ie spaces become %20 in the filename, etc. This could easily be worked around in sed, or perl or something. Sorry, I don't have time to mess with it right now.

The other thing you could do though, is just make a copy of your database files (just in case) and just do File|Add to Library and choose your iTunes Music folder. It will reimport anything that it doesn't have in the database and leave anything that is in the database alone. I do this all the time when I add music to my mp3 share from another machine to pick up all the new stuff.

[fat mac moron]

Originally posted by geekwagon:
I'm sure this would be possible to do. You could use the find command to get a list of files under a current directory:

Code:
# cd ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library
# find . -name "*.mp3" > mp3files.txt

The problem that you now run into is that the locations in iTunes xml file contains URL encodings, ie spaces become %20 in the filename, etc. This could easily be worked around in sed, or perl or something. Sorry, I don't have time to mess with it right now.

The other thing you could do though, is just make a copy of your database files (just in case) and just do File|Add to Library and choose your iTunes Music folder. It will reimport anything that it doesn't have in the database and leave anything that is in the database alone. I do this all the time when I add music to my mp3 share from another machine to pick up all the new stuff.

Good call, I'll try using the find command for *.mp3, *.m4p (the ones I'm really concerned about) and diff it against the XML file.

Thanks for the info!