[Zoom]

Bear with me... there's a bit of a story to this.

I upgraded my hard drives by shuffling them about a bit. I had an 80GB stock main drive (where my iTunes were kept, in various folders) and a 250GB secondary drive. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to move the info from the 80GB drive to the 250GB drive, then I made the 250GB drive the primary and added a new 500GB drive.

Anyway, long story short, many of the songs in iTunes were "broken" - they had the exclamation point and couldn't find the original files. Since I had no idea how to easily fix thousands of such problems, I simply found the file folder and dropped it on iTunes again, and this time let it copy all the files into the iTunes library. (Eventually, once I feel safe, I'll remove the old folder.)

Then I ran an AppleScript that I got off the web to remove the dead links. *Phew*!! Problem solved!!..... NOT.

Now all my playlists (and I probably had 40-50) were gutted because the songs "changed". Great. So I deleted them all and resigned myself to recreating the ones I really cared about. I probably only used 6-8 of them regularly.

NOW - the question. What's going to happen when I hook up my iPod? It's going to think that I have about 25GB of new songs to sync. What about the old 25GB of songs that are already on the iPod?? Will it delete them because they're no longer in my Library? I actually hope so, because otherwise there won't be enough room (30GB iPod).

Note that I do still have the original 80GB with the data on it. If I were to recover the playlists from there, would they be usable on the new drive? Wouldn't they all just have dead links? I'm handy with Perl, though... if they're XML, I could probably repair them all. Hell... I should have probably tried that in the first place, but it's too late now.

[Zoom]

I got no response on this, so I plunged ahead. I just hooked up the iPod and prayed.

So, instead of reloading all the songs, it only reloaded maybe 25% of them. I think these are the tracks that I modified with genres. Since my playlists had been blown away, I decided to try to do more labelling and use smart playlists more. Anyway, it uploaded maybe 1500 out of 5500 songs - the ones I touched, I think.

So, how does it know that the songs were the same? Is there a hidden unique ID embedded in the metadata? That is, if I basically swapped out the entire iTunes library (iTunes wasn't smart enough to know the songs were the same), then why didn't the same happen on the iPod?

And now for some reason, I've lost album art for some of these tracks - maybe the ones that were reloaded (the 1500 or so). The art is there on iTunes, but not on the iPod. (Some other songs do have art, maybe the ones that weren't reloaded.) I've checked and the "show album art on iPod" box is checked on the iPod preferences in iTunes.

Can anyone help out?

[graphics84]

hey.. sorry to hear that didn't work out.. where did you get that apple script?

I moved my libary from one exernal drive to another and over half of my songs have the dreaded explanation mark as well. I DONT want to lose my song rattings because most of my playlist art smart ones based upon that.

[Uisce]

Fwiw, (all after the fact now), iTunes maintains a db with all the front end info you see, and then links to either its iTunes Music folder with all the music in it or (God help you) all the random folders you keep music in if you don't let iTunes keep things organized.

As such, when you swapped hard drives, you broke the link between the db and the music by changing the filepath to where your music is stored. I've never done this myself, but when moving your library between disks, if you change the db file line that points to your music directory, everything should be fixed.

I also believe that if you go to iTunes and in Preferences, Advanced, and change the filepath to your music, iTunes should automatically update everything for you.

As such, you moved your music, broke the link, reimported a new set (of your old music), and then deleted half you rlibrary with broken links.

Since you "fixed" your music links before syncing the iPod, things worked pretty much according to normal. But, just as you broke the music link, broke the db link, you also broke the metadata link to the album art folder, so, guess what, you'll have to reassign everything again.... the ray of light here is that iTunes can automatically get album art now, but that will still leave you with a lot of gaps and corrections... fyi, the album art is stored in your user directory with iTunes, while some songs may have album art embedded in them.

The reason you have album art in iTunes and not the iPod - iTunes assigns one art file to an album and dynamically shows that while the iPod needs to have the art directly attached to the song file. If you choose an album in iTunes, click the album art box in the lower left corner, you will see that there is in fact no album art associated with a single song file, so you'll have to batch update everything without a direct attachment now.

Its a mess. Bottom line, be careful how you update your databases!

[Uisce]

ps - export your iTunes library and back it up - File -> Export.

Date the file and you're in good shape if something like this happens again.