Comments on: How to Fix & Repair the Lost Link to The iTunes Music Library

By: Kristina

Kristina — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:59:15 +0000

Thanks for this article! It doesn’t exactly solve my problem, but I find it useful for future reference.

My own problem is this: Almost a year ago the external hdd I kept all my music on died on me, ironically enough the same day I was gonna make a back-up of it. I’ve been looking into firms that restore hdd’s, but the cost of that is much more than I can afford. I still have all my music though, except the newly imported stuff that I’d spent hours organizing etc that very same day, on my iPod, and though I find several tutorials on how to get music from iPod to computer, and how to fix the .xml and .itl files when you have these on your computer, I find nothing about getting them directly from the iPod, or if this is even possible. I haven’t been brave enough to try and get my music from my iPod in all this time because I’m afraid I will lose all my playlists, ratings, and play counts (which I obsess a bit over). Do you have a solution to this, or know somewhere I can turn to find it?

I know it’s been a long since this article was published, but I figured it was worth a shot anyways. Thanks for all and any help anyone can give!

By: Sean S

Sean S — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:52:09 +0000

Thanks for this post. I’d temporarily renamed the folder I keep my iTunes library in )not the “My Music” folder and the next time I started iTunes the library was empty. EEK!!!

I *copied* the .itdb, itl and .xml files to the default “My Music” folder location and restarted iTunes.

Library restored!

By: Jimmy Havok

Jimmy Havok — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:48:17 +0000

It took unknown hours to finish the imports, and my iPod read the results of this as a new library…so now it’s going through an incredibly long sync operation. I hope the XTML rebuild works better, since I anticipate having to do this again.

By: Jimmy Havok

Jimmy Havok — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:18:05 +0000

I attempted to do a search-and-replace on the XML file, putting my preferred directory in the place of the bad one, then deleting the .itl file,and dumping the old libraries. No good, iTunes apparently took that as an empty library. I suppose I should have imported the corrected XML file into the old libraries directory instead.

Now I am seeing how importing the folder with all my music in it works…it looks good so far, but I suspect it’s going to take a good long while.

By: Jimmy Havok

Jimmy Havok — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 07:55:59 +0000

My worst gripe is iTunes insistence on reverting back to its preferred folder at any excuse. My music is on a network drive, and if there’s any glitch in communication at all, iTunes will jump back to its default directory and then start transferring files on its own, while losing all the links to the previous directory. All links then need to be laboriously restored by hand, until the next time the directory is reset.

I have no fix for this…although I am hoping I can set up a soft link from the iTunes preferred directory to the actual directory, so as to fool it into thinking that it is using its preferred directory.

By: Saikat

Saikat — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:30:29 +0000

Didn’t the solutions mentioned work out for you?

By: karen

karen — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:29:02 +0000

I am having the same issue!! I have to reload my music almost every time I rebook!

By: Jordan T

Jordan T — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:45:12 +0000

Maybe this will work for me. I just bought a new laptop and installed itunes 64bit and every once in a while i will open itunes and nothing will be there. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and it still did it. I even tried the 32bit version and it still happened.

By: Victor V.

Victor V. — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:16:11 +0000

What kind of audiophile uses iTunes? I’d download b3tt’s xchange 2.0 foobar customization a thousand times before considering downloading iTunes.

But hey — each madman with its own madness.