iTunes help?

[coraa]

I currently use iTunes to manage my music and podcasts, because it's handy for syncing with my iPhone and iPod.*

One of the things that iTunes does, apparently in an attempt to help, is to mark songs that aren't actually play-able and autoskip them in the future. Unfortunately, if a song exists on the network but I open iTunes when the network is temporarily unavailable (say, I'm away from home at a coffee shop, or the wireless router is being bad), it flags all the songs on my network storage device as 'unavailable' and autoskips them in the future.

This is, then, inconvenient when I return to my network and want to play them, and my playlists autoskip all my songs. I can force it to relocate the songs by manually selecting them to play, but manually playing all 900+ songs that it has helpfully flagged as unavailable is, uh, also inconvenient.

If I remove all the songs from my iTunes media library and then re-add them, it forgets the 'this song doesn't exist' flag and plays them correctly, but that's both time-consuming and annoying.

Is there any way to tell iTunes to forget all its 'this song doesn't exist!' flags? Or else to force a refresh of the iTunes media library without removing and re-adding all my files? Does anyone know?

* - That means that if your advice is the oh-so-clever 'don't use iTunes,' you are advised to keep it to yourself. With the exception of this one irritant, I'm pretty happy with it.

Comments

[cofax7]

I have to admit that my answer to this problem was: get a laptop with a large enough hard drive to hold ALL my music on it. Because yeah, every time I ran iTunes when the old laptop wasn't connected to the external drive, I got the fun little question mark icon. SO ANNOYING.

[coraa]

Ha, yes. My temporary solution has been to copy all of my most-used playlists locally to my laptop, so that I don't run into the issue as often. x_x

I confess to being a bit surprised that it's a Thing. Surely the iTunes developers have noticed that a great many people have a networked media server? Both Apple and PC users?

[zeborah]

Is there anything in Preferences? I can't see anything myself but all my music is on my laptop so there might be a setting that doesn't display for me.

[cxcvi]

Is this any help? I don't know if it will solve your issues (I'm not an iTunes user, so I don't know what to search for; presumably, you've tried searching as well), but it seems to be something that's not easy to Google for. I would be surprised if you're the only person who's had this issue, though...

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Some digging later, I have a possible solution.

Your library index is stored in a file called, by default, Itunes Library.itl (original, no?). I recommend creating two such files, one with all the network drive music, one without. Or, depending on your use patterns, you might get away with just one, backup copy of the index. When you get back to your network drive and reconnect it, simply overwrite the now-incorrect index file with the backup copy, which should have all your "unplayable" songs still listed as playable. You'll have to update the backup whenever you add music to your library, mind. Again, depending on your usage patterns, that can be automated with a once-daily (better yet, nightly) script that will grab a copy the index and save you the management.

(if this works, can I then complain about my dislike of iTunes?)

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

this was a pretty good article on the topic... Well, sort of on the topic.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I will try that! And thank you!

You're welcome to complain about iTunes. I just—well, I have a Dell PC laptop, and an iPhone and iPod which I manage using iTunes, and that means that whenever I post to get help with computer problems I get either the Mac contingent blaming things on it being a PC or the PC contingent blaming things on it being an Apple product or the Unix/Linux contingent being smugly superior in general, and none of the above actually helps solve the problem. So I tend to warn against it at the beginning, just because I don't feel the need to allow people to be smug at my expense. ;)

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can understand. I've had my share of arguments with Mac zealots -- which tends to turn me into a Windows zealot; funny, given that I dislike Window$ intensely. My wife is a lifelong Mac user, so we can have the OS wars in the comfort of our own home, any day we choose to :)

I also intensely dislike iTunes, but I won't complain about it without an alternative app to recommend, and I don't know of one. (if I did, I'd be using it!) Nothing that will manage all of my apps, music, podcasts (those in particular, since if you just upload them, the iTouch won't recognize them as podcasts) *and* recognize my jailbroken iTouch. Oh, for a viable third-party alternative...

My issue with iTunes is with the design choices. I'll let Tog do the talking; he's got way more authority on the subject.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Also, you should check your #ebz "home" tab...

[ckd]

This article might be helpful. It implies that if you restart iTunes with the network drive mounted, it'll re-find them all. (I haven't tested this myself.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you! If that works, that would make me a happy camper.