#Music rescue windows vista mac os#
#Music rescue windows vista manual#
#Music rescue windows vista Pc#

If you have an iPod or iOS device that contained all or most of your content, you may also have some success rebuilding at least part of your iTunes library from that device. iTunes will use the identifying tag information that is already in the MP3/AAC files to populate its database, so you won’t lose things like song, artist and album names, but unfortunately you won’t get back data such as playlists, ratings and play counts and you will need to reconfigure your iPod and iOS device sync settings again. If you cannot find or recover the ITL file, then your only other option may be to simply start a new iTunes library and reimport all of your music and other media content back into it from the external hard drive. See our tutorial on Transferring your iTunes Library for more details about how this all fits together. Simply putting this into the corresponding location on your laptop should be enough to allow iTunes to find your library, although you should also ensure that your external hard drive is assigned the same drive letter as it had on the desktop PC, and you’ll need to check the “iTunes Media” folder path in your advanced settings to ensure that it’s pointing to the external hard drive. Ideally, you should restore the entire “iTunes” folder if it’s available, but failing that you’ll need at least the ITL file.

#Music rescue windows vista Pc#

If you still have access to the hard drive on that PC or have a backup of the data that was stored there you can easily recover your library database to the new laptop or the external hard drive. The iTunes library database folder contains a number of files and folders, however the critical file is the database itself, “iTunes l.” If this file is not located anywhere on your external hard drive, then it is most likely that only your media content was on that drive, and your library database was on your desktop PC. As long as you’re backing up your internal hard drive this is not normally an issue, and the iTunes database folder is relatively small in comparison to most users’ media content.

#Music rescue windows vista manual#

Unfortunately, this additional, manual step means that most users who are using an external hard drive with iTunes are likely only storing their content on that drive, with the iTunes library database still living on the internal system drive, but may not necessarily be aware that this is the case. ITunes does not provide any way for the user to automatically move the database folder to another location, although it is possible to do this manually by shutting down iTunes, moving or copying the database files over to the new location, and then restarting iTunes while holding the SHIFT key (Windows) or OPT key (Mac) and selecting the new database folder location. However this setting has nothing to do with the location of the iTunes library database your library database will remain in your home folder regardless of what you set the iTunes Media folder path to. The iTunes Media folder, specified under iTunes’ advanced preferences, specifies where your content is stored by default.

Generic track data such as song name, artist, album and genre are generally stored within the tracks themselves as well as in the iTunes database, as it artwork that you add to your tracks manually or via third-party artwork utilities. The library database is what contains the location of all of your content along with information such as playlists, ratings, play counts, last played dates, iPod and iOS device sync settings and other iTunes-specific information.

#Music rescue windows vista mac os#

A: It sounds like the problem here is that your iTunes library database remained on your desktop PC while only your actual content was moved to the external hard drive.īy default, iTunes stores its library database (“iTunes l”) in a folder named “iTunes” under the Music folder in the current user’s home folder this folder is named “My Music” on Windows XP, or simply “Music” on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X.