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TICKET ARCHIVE -> iTunes not recognizing music on ext HD

oif3bill - Oct 26, 2006 - 5:50 am

I just bought a Macbook Pro 2.0. Prior to the MCP, I had a Viao that worked fine until I downloaded iTunes 7. All 26k songs are on an external hard drive. When I downloaded iT7, the music would play very choppy, even if i was ONLY listening to music (I enclude this b.c I am not sure if its realted or not to my current problem).

I opened my MBP today. Turned everything on and started playing around with it. I opened iTunes and upgraded it to 7.0.1. I then restarted the computer (thinking it was a PC for min) then opened preferences then changed the location of my music to the hard drive. I see the music. I can even open the music on the hd. But itunes doesn't see it. I even moved a folder to the desktop and tried clicking and dragging into iTunes. No avail.

I have looked on every forum, on every website I can find. I have been working on this for a really long time (6 hours now). I even deleted iTunes and reinstalled it. Nothing.

ANY help you can give is GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks

Stuartpau - Oct 27, 2006 - 9:59 am

HI, I am pretty sure I know what the problem is and it is related to where you are storing your music.

I think the following will resolve your problem.

Before you start doing the following, go to your home folder, open up the Library there, not the one on the main startup drive the one inside your home folder. I try to be really specific about these things because there are 3 different libraries with the exact same name on the Macs running OSX and if you alter the wrong one you can cause damage to your OS.

Inside the Home Library look for the preferences folder, open it and locate (com.apple.iTunes.plist) and delete it. iTunes will make another one as soonas it launches and at that point it should be back to its original settings as if you had just installed it. IF there are any other ITunes related .plist files you can delete them as well. Once you have done that do what follows, it should cure your problem, including the playback issues.

Itunes initially if you already have a library going looks for it in your home folder the one that looks like a little house. Inside that you should find a folder called Music. Depending on what else you have installed you should see a folder called Itunes. Inside that folder you should see another Folder called Itunes Music. That folder is supposed to contain all your music. The problem with that, at least for me and a zillion other users is that it is on your main startup drive and definitely not a convenient location. So what you do is, locate the folder on the other HD that actually contains your Itunes or music or whatever and rename it Itunes Music. Make an Alias of it and replace the Itunes Music Folder in your Home folder with the Alias. This will point I tunes to the real location of your Music. Just make sure that there is no music in the folder you are about to replace with the alias(Shortcut) and if there is anything there, drag it to the folder on your other HD first so you don't lost it.

To make the alias, Click and hold the icon of the folder where your music really is, then whilst holding the Command (Apple Key) and the option key, drag over to the Itunes Music Folder Location, and substitute the alias for the Itunes Music folder, once you are sure it is empty. It might be a good idea to delete the Itunes Music folder and then place the alias with the exact same name in that location. I cannot swear to this, but it is possible with some of aliases, to CMD, Opt drag your proper music folder to that location, without renaming your proper music folder. However you must make sure that the Alias has the correct name or Itunes will miss it.
So it is Username/Music/iTunes/ITunes Music (this part would be the alias that points to your real music folder).

Make sure iTunes is not open when you do this, and if you have a lot of music, be prepared to wait a while, as iTunes updates its library.

I have used this approach to the problem of Itunes wanting everything on my startup drive, ever since iTunes became available and it works for me right now, on a mac book Pro with around 20Gigs of music. So you should have no problem.

IF you do drop me a response and we will take it from there OK?.

Stuart

oif3bill - Oct 28, 2006 - 9:59 am

Hey Stuart....noticed the "pau" in your name...your not from hawaii by chance are you? If not, Pau means 'Finished.' Anyway, thanks for your advice. It helped. The main problem with my computer was that the ExHD was formatted NTFS (not FAT32) so the mac could only read it....which is why it would only show me the music and play one song at a time. So, reading the forums here, I found out that I needed to reformat it. I could not find any forums here to explain how to do it, so I went to apple.com/forums. A guy there helped me out with that. Basically, i ended up putting all 122G of music on my three iPods and then use the mac to reformat the ExHD. After that, I used the mac to put the music on the ipods back onto the ExHD. Worked great! Once that was done, then I followed your advice with the Home library trick (Awesome!) and the Aliases thingy. Sorry, you'll have to forgive me....I am still trying to adjust to the who "mac" scene. See, I have been a "closeted-mac supporter" for quit a while. While it was cool to own an iPod, it definately was Tabu to support Apple....know what I mean?

Thanks so much for your help and assistance. Without it, I would still be wondering if I made the right choice! I am glad I did! Now...can anyone help figure out the "Right Click" on a mouse with only one button?????

Aloha! (from hawaii too, btw)

Stuartpau - Oct 28, 2006 - 6:24 pm

HI and ALoha from Tennessee but I am from England the PAU is the initials of the end of my full name, Stuart P Au had to use the u as the secong letter of my surname as Stuartpa had already gone, sorry about the Hawaii bit, got to get there one between Volcanoes, Astronomy and Scuba diving it sure sounds like a really neat place to live.

Well if I had known you were messing around with different drive formats you might not have got he Alias (Shortcut) trick and we would have probably ended up reformatting just as you had to, which is a pity because personally I like the NTFs system becase FAT 32 takes up too much space with smaller files and you can do a lot more creative drive management with NTFS, but with all the Mac Formats and the PC Drie formats now in one machine, it is going to get interesting, especially when you throw journaling in.

I know what you mean about having to be a closet Apple freak though I had to have a couple of NT Workstations running dual processors a number of years ago, because there was nothing in the mac world at that time that could compete with Maya and 3D Studio Max. Thank god all that has changed. BEtween this Russian guy who has OsX running on PC's and Macs running Windows ( I have my copy of WIndows XP Pro) just waiting for my MacPro's to get here. I loved the Macbook Pro so much it was no big deal going for the Desktops as well, loaded.

Now go out, go to Logitech and buy an MX mouse and you will have the Scroll wheel and the right click. IF you really want a right click with a one button mouse hold down the Control key and click the mouse button, you will get the Contextual menu that you would get on Windows on the one butto mouse.
Never really understood why Apple did that, they do actually make a wireless 3 Button mouse with a control ball bearing.

No problem getting into the4 Mac Scene, there are tons of folks ere love their Macs, some Love their PCs too and some well dare I say it in the USA today, so are, yup Bi. Whoops there goes another one, now for a whole week of CNN going crazy over nothing.

No glad I was able to help and I gather your problem is sorted so I will close out the ticket.

Luck Stuart.

If I have closed out the ticket too early you can either repost it, or drop me a line at
stuarta@macosx

Ok.

Stuart Peter Austwick or (StuartPAu)