I did end up just copying from my original hard drive. Place it in an enclosure and plugged it in. I thinking of dumping Time Machine in favor of Carbon Copy Cloner or some other backup app. I've had Time Machine not quite work for a full reinstall a few times now. It is great, though, when I need to go back and grab a delete file, but then again, all my important files are on different cloud services.
Pray for me, I'm trying to update from Windows iTunes 10 to iTunes 12 on a very old laptop. Tired of not having all my ringtones & workout videos. My iPhone is fairly old, so it does have some ringtones I made while iTunes v10 could still work with iPhone 5 and whatever OS it had at the time.
Got an iPad last June and now I'm going on another road trip (Mardi Gras in NOLA, never been, it's been on my bucket list but I digress) and I MUST HAVE MY WONDERFUL MUSIC on my iPad. And newer ringtones on my iPhone.
For those of you interested, the old trick that used to work about 2 years ago AFAIK, of doing a shift-start using an older version .itl with the most current version iTunes does NOT work. Now, it tells me iTunes has stopped working and fetches some bastardized library from the iCloud that I thought I'd deleted. That library consists of my 1st free iTunes download of the week back when they had them, "Breathe (2 AM)", by Anna Nalick, and some stupid free movie/TV stuff. Gaaaaaah.
So happy I tried it on a friend's PC, because iTunes 12 does really stupid things to an .itl file I've not had to rebuild since I got my first iPod in 2006. It still shows Date Added on my songs. Quite a feat, since that's like, the ONE field Apple decided not to allow to be rebuilt from an .xml file.
I've finally updated my OS including an iTunes update to 12. No problems with iTunes, but the jump from Snow Leopard to El Capitan has created a situation where I haven't been able to restart or shut down my desktop. Apparently, this is a "thing" - and so I have to hard boot every time I want to shut down and power up.
My new plan: get this old laptop to work, install iTunes 10, allow Apple Software Update to ask me if I want to upgrade (which has ALWAYS been against my cardinal rules), and we shall see.
It won't end in tears either way; I'll get updated content on my iPhone & iPad.
We'll just see if Apple programmers dealt with "Date Added" properly. Looks like somebody took over the project mid-release sometime around v11 and just paid attention to "Recently Added".
I only forcibly rebuilt my library from an xml file once, back in 2009, but it did indeed lose all DateAdded values, resetting them. For a long while I switched my playlists to check Date Modified, which was preserved, tho only a proxy of Added. After time I switched back, since the subsequent Added values regained meaning.
I've kept mine intact too, across a succession of PCs, since 2005 - Bill Evans Live at the Village Vanguard was the first CD I ripped. Never had to try it with iTunes 12, though that's probably coming soon. Any advantage to updating to 12 on the old machine before I switch to the new "music computer"?
I got a new computer at the weekend, a Lenovo with both a hard drive and a SSD. it starts so quickly, brilliant. But my major task is to transfer from one computer to the other. The main things are music and photos. i am going to start by making sure my back up is totally up to date. the new machine has a 27inch touchscreen. it is just like using a giant iPad!
Is there a library size after which iTunes stops working as well? Lately I am seeing significant time lag when switching between views (e.g. going from viewing a playlist to clicking on "Artist" results in a 5-10 second wait, despite the pretty fast computer). I am wondering if it's an issue with the release, the installation, or the number of songs in the library.
To answer my own question, after an hour of wrestling with an iTunes update and eventually a clean uninstall and reinstall it's much more responsive now.
At the moment I am in the process of moving my music from one computer to another - both PCs. Only time will tell if I am successful in getting everything from the old iTunes to the new iTunes! it is not so straightforward as I had hoped because my music seems to be stored in a number of locations depending upon how and where it was downloaded from originally.
@greg I think there is a "Consolidate" feature you can use to copy everything to one folder. Look it up! Only hitch is you need enough disc space to accommodate the files that need to be copied
My approach has always been to not to put my music files in any iTunes folder, but to maintain a folder hierarchy under My Music. Anything iTunes controls makes me nervous.
I've been on hold at emusic for over a month (some days have required self-control and giving myself a stern talking to - those cheap booster packs have been very addictive). I have been using the time to do some maintenance work on my iTunes library. So far I have discovered about ten albums that were on my hard drive but not in my library (therefore never getting into the rotation) - probably through accidental deletion, because they were all in the library once upon a time. I have also deleted maybe 10 GB of music that I never plan to listen to again: folders full of junk free stuff mostly, reflecting the phase when my inner cash-strapped teenager figured out that the internet was now full of free music and I could download it all! Also some other stuff for which I just decided life was too short.
I am already seeing a positive effect on a trend I was noticing - that thanks to my determination to keep everything rotating I kept seeing stuff on my iPod that I just didn't want to listen to (but somehow felt I had to, to rotate it off again). It feels good to be spending a while just listening to stuff I already have and that I really, really like. I plan to stick at the pruning a while longer, until my inner hoarder starts squealing too loudly again.
I have also deleted maybe 10 GB of music that I never plan to listen to again:
---- ***SHUDDER*** For the first time in over 6 months I didn't buy the largest booster in February nor this month but I came so close a couple of days back. Then I remembered I was supposed to be tidying up my general downloads folder where Bandcamp and classical label music goes. That's a job to last me most of the summer...
I'm just about finished transferring everything to my computer. I am fairly sure I have everything, but perhaps 5% I've downloaded twice somehow. I put it all on a new external hard drive then copied to the new computer. It took two attempts - when i did it the way suggested by Apple, everything was an utter mess, not helped by having an SSD as well as the normal hard drive. So I deleted everything, made sure the SSD was not being used, tried using the way suggested by a computer magazine site and it worked well. The only problem is that second time I didn't get all the ancillary data (plays, ratings,playlists etc) that was there first time. So it must be on my external drive. But that is something for another day. the slowest part was uploading to the external drive. downloading back was quick in comparison - USB3 versus USB2!
I'm just about finished transferring everything to my computer. I am fairly sure I have everything, but perhaps 5% I've downloaded twice somehow. I put it all on a new external hard drive then copied to the new computer. It took two attempts - when i did it the way suggested by Apple, everything was an utter mess, not helped by having an SSD as well as the normal hard drive. So I deleted everything, made sure the SSD was not being used, tried using the way suggested by a computer magazine site and it worked well. The only problem is that second time I didn't get all the ancillary data (plays, ratings,playlists etc) that was there first time. So it must be on my external drive. But that is something for another day. the slowest part was uploading to the external drive. downloading back was quick in comparison - USB3 versus USB2!
Apple is surprisingly bad when it comes to restoring from back ups and time machine. It doesn't "just work" and I did lots of research before, during, and after, but still had many problems. I've started using Disk Doubler for a real back up. I don't know if this was your experience, too, Greg, but I was going from a 500 GB drive down to a 250 SSD, which was difficult to get to work and I trimmed that 500 GB's content to well below the 250 SSD, too. My 2007 iMac runs overall better and gives me something until I replace it later this year when Apple gets its act together and releases new iMacs.
It's finally time for me to move my music library to another PC. It has been on a decade-old laptop all this time. (Actually the files are on an external HD, but iTunes is on the laptop).
Interested in input on some matters:
1. I consolidated my library on the laptop, which led to the creation of a new Music folder. This was within the old Music folder (ie, iTunes/Music/Music), which played hell with my backup process. (Backup software deleted all the folders in "Music" before copying them to "Music/Music" - Took more than 24 hours.) Better to leave this as it is, or try to manually go back to one "Music" folder?
2. I will be moving to a much newer version of iTunes. Any problems with simply dropping the iTunes files (itl, xml, etc) into the new computer? Any advantage of updating iTunes on the old laptop first? Music files will remain on the external HD.
On checking, I see I will be moving from iTunes 12.2 to 12.6 - Not as much of a jump as I thought. Hoping that will avoid the iTunes 12 .itl probs Katrina mentions above. I already moved the much smaller "office" library between versions of iTunes 12 with no problem.
Hoping my old library data can make the jump intact!
I moved mine similarly a month or so back. It works much better if you are moving Apple IOS to Apple or Windows to Apple. I was moving Windows to Windows. I tried to consolidate my library (several times!) but each time it stopped and came up with a message that there was a file with a name too long. No indication which file name, really helpful. It might have taken me days to check that out. So in the end I moved the folders as they were - eg, iTunes, emusic, emusicj amazon etc. I was able to move playlists but did not find a way to move number of plays, last played etc. I also quickly realised that you had to do an actually copy from my external drive to iTunes, otherwise iTunes just assumed the external drive was the source, which I didn't want, I wanted it on my new hard drive. I had additional complications because I have two hard drives on my new computer, one being a smaller SSD. I had to make sure every time I copied something it wasn't going onto the SSD.
If I was buying my new computer now. I'd have probably bought one with just say a bit larger SSD without the 1TB hard drive and kept my music on the external drives. I've done this for photos to save memory and it is working well. Also I might have bought an Apple rather than my Lenovo AIO. Having said that I am really pleased with the computer, especially the large touch screen.
It did take me several goes to get it right! In the end I needed to check through my old computer iTunes to check I'd got everything. There were still perhaps 20 albums missing, so I checked back their locations to find them. Most of these were albums I had downloaded from unusual places that had gone to strange locations on m y hard drive! Best wishes Doofy!
Thanks Greg - I am successfully on the other side! Moving all the library data was as simple as moving those files to the new computer.
In fact I transferred two libraries, as the office music went on to the new office computer. The program stays on the SSD, while the music files go on the "Data Drive" - Little different from putting them on an external drive. I now have to tell the computer to keep my work docs on that drive too.
Consolidate worked fine for me - reminds me I should run it periodically to keep things shipshape. I was left with a handful of leftover files and puzzling things, all readily explainable on inspection (empty folders, albums I had split up, etc). Only tricky thing was it created a Music subfolder (within "Music"), which caused my backup program to delete and then re-copy my library - Took a day and a half!
It's a small thing in and of itself, but I would have been saved many, many hours if the programmers of iTunes had simply had the dialog that comes up when you delete track to ask you if you are sure state how many tracks you are about to delete. Like "Are you sure you want to delete these 173 tracks?"
That's because if you decide to delete an album, and don't quite click on the first track properly even though you thought you did, and then hold down shift and select the rest of the tracks in the album, it selects every track from the beginning of all the albums visible in the view you have open, most of which are of course off-screen to keep you from noticing. Then you click delete and....
I know about this and try to be careful but I still keep discovering that the reason I have not heard an album in a long time is because it is not in the library any more due to some past deleting error (which might have been just deleting an album to re-add it to try to persuade iTunes to join all its tracks into one album).
I might have moaned about this before, but I just discovered that all of my offthesky albums before the letter O in the alphabet were gone from the library. That's a lot of albums. (24 to be exact.) Of course play count information is then also messed up.
I'm always amazed at your Mars version of iTunes, because I've never heard of these problems before.
When you go to delete an album and you highlight all of the tunes, you should get this:
... then you make the decision and it just either deletes them from your iTunes listing ("keep files") or you can completely delete them from your library ("move to trash"). I have never heard of this thing where it deletes large swaths of open-screen stuff. Actually, when you highlight tracks, it tells you at the bottom of the window how many tracks you have highlighted:
I almost always work in artist view, and the mutliselect happens when you have an artist open and use shift-select without properly clicking on the first track of the intended album. I should try only deleting in list view and see if it helps.
I have a smart playlist that has the following criteria:
Last played is not in the last 60 months. Plays is greater than 1. Genre does not contain Christmas. Album does not contain Christmas. (Just to be sure :-))
iTunes just added to that playlist an album that I bought a month ago. It has a play count of 2 but no last played date. That is the second time I have found an album played very recently that did not have a last played date logged. I suspect in this case it might be because I revised some album tag info?
Workaround is to revise the list to a date range...
Yeah, it's weird. I did realize that at least some of them are my fault - sometimes when an album gets inadvertently deleted from library, then when I re-add it, I use a java script thing to reset its play count to roughly what it was before so that it does not mess up my play-count-based playlists by immediately switching to the never played category. That would give it a play count but no last played date. That covers some of the anomalies I have, maybe most, but I am not sure quite all of them.
i have another odd behavior right now that is not causing problems but puzzling me. Every time I connect my iPod about 80 tracks are re-syncing over to the iPod, even if nothing has changed on either end since the last sync (even if the last sync was minutes ago in the same session). They sync fine each time, and the number seems to be slowly decreasing, so I guess this will gradually disappear as those tracks cycle off my playlists.
iTunes is driving me nuts. I have an iPhone 6 with 128 GB and I'm trying to change out the music, swapping a few large playlists (deleting one and adding two). I have tried four times. First time it seemed like it worked but this morning on the way to work I realized that I had NO music on the damn thing. So I've been trying tonight. Got hung up twice mid-sync, now it seems to be downloading something but will have to see if it finishes. I recall having a similar problem the last time I tried to change out music but don't remember how it resolved. Pain in the ass.
Are you doing USB or wifi sync? Try USB if it's not working over wifi. Or a different USB port, if you're already having this issue with USB syncing.
Next thing, try syncing smaller chunks of music. See if just one large playlist will sync.
iTunes is wretched at telling what file or folder it is having problems with, unfortunately. If it has a problem with one track, it hangs up and doesn't tell you which track it is. It's probably one damaged file that is stopping everything. The difficult part will be finding which file. If you watch the sync closely, can you tell which song it stopped at? It's either that file, or most likely the file right after that.
Windows assigns different drive letters when USB devices are plugged in - ipods had issues with that about 10 years ago and I wouldn't count on Apple having fixed it for iphones, lol. If you eject the iPhone from iTunes but it stays connected in Windows Explorer (assuming you're on a windows PC), there are drive letter issues.
"iTunes just added to that playlist an album that I bought a month ago. It has a play count of 2 but no last played date. That is the second time I have found an album played very recently that did not have a last played date logged. I suspect in this case it might be because I revised some album tag info?"
Are you manually managing or syncing? Manually managing won't update last played date. It's a custom iTunes tag.
Do you have more than one Apple device?
Do you use crossfade? Windows or Mac?
Hope you have all your album tags set for 2.3. iTunes uses 2.2 by default.
2.4 is unstable - latest version isn't the best, in other words.
Whenever I rip a CD in iTunes, I change tags to "none" to get rid of the v2.2 crap, then change them to 2.3.
Comments
Pray for me, I'm trying to update from Windows iTunes 10 to iTunes 12 on a very old laptop. Tired of not having all my ringtones & workout videos. My iPhone is fairly old, so it does have some ringtones I made while iTunes v10 could still work with iPhone 5 and whatever OS it had at the time.
Got an iPad last June and now I'm going on another road trip (Mardi Gras in NOLA, never been, it's been on my bucket list but I digress) and I MUST HAVE MY WONDERFUL MUSIC on my iPad. And newer ringtones on my iPhone.
For those of you interested, the old trick that used to work about 2 years ago AFAIK, of doing a shift-start using an older version .itl with the most current version iTunes does NOT work. Now, it tells me iTunes has stopped working and fetches some bastardized library from the iCloud that I thought I'd deleted. That library consists of my 1st free iTunes download of the week back when they had them, "Breathe (2 AM)", by Anna Nalick, and some stupid free movie/TV stuff. Gaaaaaah.
So happy I tried it on a friend's PC, because iTunes 12 does really stupid things to an .itl file I've not had to rebuild since I got my first iPod in 2006. It still shows Date Added on my songs. Quite a feat, since that's like, the ONE field Apple decided not to allow to be rebuilt from an .xml file.
No problems with iTunes, but the jump from Snow Leopard
to El Capitan has created a situation where I haven't been
able to restart or shut down my desktop. Apparently, this
is a "thing" - and so I have to hard boot every time I want
to shut down and power up.
It won't end in tears either way; I'll get updated content on my iPhone & iPad.
We'll just see if Apple programmers dealt with "Date Added" properly. Looks like somebody took over the project mid-release sometime around v11 and just paid attention to "Recently Added".
I've been on hold at emusic for over a month (some days have required self-control and giving myself a stern talking to - those cheap booster packs have been very addictive). I have been using the time to do some maintenance work on my iTunes library. So far I have discovered about ten albums that were on my hard drive but not in my library (therefore never getting into the rotation) - probably through accidental deletion, because they were all in the library once upon a time. I have also deleted maybe 10 GB of music that I never plan to listen to again: folders full of junk free stuff mostly, reflecting the phase when my inner cash-strapped teenager figured out that the internet was now full of free music and I could download it all! Also some other stuff for which I just decided life was too short.
I am already seeing a positive effect on a trend I was noticing - that thanks to my determination to keep everything rotating I kept seeing stuff on my iPod that I just didn't want to listen to (but somehow felt I had to, to rotate it off again). It feels good to be spending a while just listening to stuff I already have and that I really, really like. I plan to stick at the pruning a while longer, until my inner hoarder starts squealing too loudly again.
Interested in input on some matters:
1. I consolidated my library on the laptop, which led to the creation of a new Music folder. This was within the old Music folder (ie, iTunes/Music/Music), which played hell with my backup process. (Backup software deleted all the folders in "Music" before copying them to "Music/Music" - Took more than 24 hours.) Better to leave this as it is, or try to manually go back to one "Music" folder?
2. I will be moving to a much newer version of iTunes. Any problems with simply dropping the iTunes files (itl, xml, etc) into the new computer? Any advantage of updating iTunes on the old laptop first? Music files will remain on the external HD.
On checking, I see I will be moving from iTunes 12.2 to 12.6 - Not as much of a jump as I thought. Hoping that will avoid the iTunes 12 .itl probs Katrina mentions above. I already moved the much smaller "office" library between versions of iTunes 12 with no problem.
Hoping my old library data can make the jump intact!
If I was buying my new computer now. I'd have probably bought one with just say a bit larger SSD without the 1TB hard drive and kept my music on the external drives. I've done this for photos to save memory and it is working well. Also I might have bought an Apple rather than my Lenovo AIO. Having said that I am really pleased with the computer, especially the large touch screen.
It did take me several goes to get it right! In the end I needed to check through my old computer iTunes to check I'd got everything. There were still perhaps 20 albums missing, so I checked back their locations to find them. Most of these were albums I had downloaded from unusual places that had gone to strange locations on m y hard drive! Best wishes Doofy!
In fact I transferred two libraries, as the office music went on to the new office computer. The program stays on the SSD, while the music files go on the "Data Drive" - Little different from putting them on an external drive. I now have to tell the computer to keep my work docs on that drive too.
Consolidate worked fine for me - reminds me I should run it periodically to keep things shipshape. I was left with a handful of leftover files and puzzling things, all readily explainable on inspection (empty folders, albums I had split up, etc). Only tricky thing was it created a Music subfolder (within "Music"), which caused my backup program to delete and then re-copy my library - Took a day and a half!
It's a small thing in and of itself, but I would have been saved many, many hours if the programmers of iTunes had simply had the dialog that comes up when you delete track to ask you if you are sure state how many tracks you are about to delete. Like "Are you sure you want to delete these 173 tracks?"
That's because if you decide to delete an album, and don't quite click on the first track properly even though you thought you did, and then hold down shift and select the rest of the tracks in the album, it selects every track from the beginning of all the albums visible in the view you have open, most of which are of course off-screen to keep you from noticing. Then you click delete and....
I know about this and try to be careful but I still keep discovering that the reason I have not heard an album in a long time is because it is not in the library any more due to some past deleting error (which might have been just deleting an album to re-add it to try to persuade iTunes to join all its tracks into one album).
I might have moaned about this before, but I just discovered that all of my offthesky albums before the letter O in the alphabet were gone from the library. That's a lot of albums. (24 to be exact.) Of course play count information is then also messed up.
because I've never heard of these problems before.
When you go to delete an album and you highlight all of the tunes,
you should get this:
... then you make the decision and it just either deletes them from your iTunes listing
("keep files") or you can completely delete them from your library ("move to trash").
I have never heard of this thing where it deletes large swaths of open-screen stuff.
Actually, when you highlight tracks, it tells you at the bottom of the window how many tracks you have highlighted:
so, yet again, I'm baffled by the problems.
I hope you work it out.
Last played is not in the last 60 months.
Plays is greater than 1.
Genre does not contain Christmas.
Album does not contain Christmas. (Just to be sure :-))
iTunes just added to that playlist an album that I bought a month ago. It has a play count of 2 but no last played date. That is the second time I have found an album played very recently that did not have a last played date logged. I suspect in this case it might be because I revised some album tag info?
Workaround is to revise the list to a date range...
i have another odd behavior right now that is not causing problems but puzzling me. Every time I connect my iPod about 80 tracks are re-syncing over to the iPod, even if nothing has changed on either end since the last sync (even if the last sync was minutes ago in the same session). They sync fine each time, and the number seems to be slowly decreasing, so I guess this will gradually disappear as those tracks cycle off my playlists.
https://getsatisfaction.com/lastfm/topics/double-scrobbles-6kg606ijsql8e
For now, turn on 'confirm device scrobbles' and reject the ones played from iTunes proper. Annoying for sure.
EDIT: haha, i mentally read 'scrobble' instead of 'sync', and just leaped onto the problem that was currently annoying me. Never mind!
Are you doing USB or wifi sync? Try USB if it's not working over wifi. Or a different USB port, if you're already having this issue with USB syncing.
Next thing, try syncing smaller chunks of music. See if just one large playlist will sync.
iTunes is wretched at telling what file or folder it is having problems with, unfortunately. If it has a problem with one track, it hangs up and doesn't tell you which track it is. It's probably one damaged file that is stopping everything. The difficult part will be finding which file. If you watch the sync closely, can you tell which song it stopped at? It's either that file, or most likely the file right after that.
Also check if other USB ports are being used.
Windows assigns different drive letters when USB devices are plugged in - ipods had issues with that about 10 years ago and I wouldn't count on Apple having fixed it for iphones, lol. If you eject the iPhone from iTunes but it stays connected in Windows Explorer (assuming you're on a windows PC), there are drive letter issues.
Good luck!
Germanprof-
"iTunes just added to that playlist an album that I bought a month ago. It has a play count of 2 but no last played date. That is the second time I have found an album played very recently that did not have a last played date logged. I suspect in this case it might be because I revised some album tag info?"
Are you manually managing or syncing? Manually managing won't update last played date. It's a custom iTunes tag.
Do you have more than one Apple device?
Do you use crossfade? Windows or Mac?
Hope you have all your album tags set for 2.3. iTunes uses 2.2 by default.
2.4 is unstable - latest version isn't the best, in other words.
Whenever I rip a CD in iTunes, I change tags to "none" to get rid of the v2.2 crap, then change them to 2.3.