itunes help please

[Lee H]

First of all, I'm sorry if this is the wrong area, please move if required.

Right, I've had to install itunes to transfer a load of mp3 files from my PC to my phone. Basically, all my music was stored on a RAID array on the drive letter F:

A few months ago, I grabbed a load of 1 Tb drives and installed them within the PC and moved all the music from the smaller 250 Gb drives (RAIDED) onto my 1 Tb drives (RAIDED) so that they have more space as my music collection grows faster than bamboo on a damp day.

Anyway, after doing this I had to add the folder again to itunes so that it knew where all my music is now located. The problem however is that each Mp3 file is listed twice, 1 with the old F:/ and the new Z:/. The file which is located on F:/ has an exclamation mark to say it has a problem with this file (talk about state the obvious!)

How do I get it to remove all the repetative files which are no longer located on system as I've been through all the menus and cannot find anything to do this?

Any help would be great

[Englander]

First of all, I'm sorry if this is the wrong area, please move if required.

Right, I've had to install itunes to transfer a load of mp3 files from my PC to my phone. Basically, all my music was stored on a RAID array on the drive letter F:

A few months ago, I grabbed a load of 1 Tb drives and installed them within the PC and moved all the music from the smaller 250 Gb drives (RAIDED) onto my 1 Tb drives (RAIDED) so that they have more space as my music collection grows faster than bamboo on a damp day.

Anyway, after doing this I had to add the folder again to itunes so that it knew where all my music is now located. The problem however is that each Mp3 file is listed twice, 1 with the old F:/ and the new Z:/. The file which is located on F:/ has an exclamation mark to say it has a problem with this file (talk about state the obvious!)

How do I get it to remove all the repetative files which are no longer located on system as I've been through all the menus and cannot find anything to do this?

Any help would be great

Is there any way you could sort the songs (clicking on the field headings at the top) which would put all the ! songs next to each other? Then you could just highlight them all and press delete.

[jim]

Can you not just delete all of them and rescan?

It works in WMP because all the information is saved within the mp3 itself, but I don't know about itunes.

[0iD]

Can you not just delete all of them and rescan?

It works in WMP because all the information is saved within the mp3 itself, but I don't know about itunes.

It's the quickest way imo with iTunes Delete them all from the library and re-add the folder.

[watforddude]

Only problem..
you loose all playlists.
25 most played etccc..

but in comparison to having the same song repeated a number of times im sure its pretty minor.

[Lucio]

Better yet, just click on "Show Duplicates" (under File) and sort by the Play Count column (theory being that all the old versions will have more plays than the newer version) and then you can delete enmasse

[mycarsavw]

Lee - I had to do this the weekend before last (3d, 4h of music, duplicate songs, dead links etc etc)

I used this method and it worked perfectly.

[pipTheGeek]

iTunes can be a pain for this sort of thing. If you have a backup of your old library file then I would restore that, then edit the XML file (use a find/replace in notepad would be enough) to change all the F drive's to z Drive. iTunes puts a lot of other stuff near the drive letter so you would be safe from changing things other than the file paths. If you can do this then you will be able to keep all your ratings, play lists etc. Otherwise you will lose them.
If you don't have a backup and you have only just imported all the tracks from their new location then I would empty the library and re-import it again.
You could also find a friendly programmer who could knock up a little app to do a one off process of your library xml file and fix it. I had to do this a little while ago when apple removed the option to not include track numbers in file names. Worked fine when iTunes renamed all the files and updated my library. Wasn't so good for my wife who has her own library file but shares the same set of files.