You have a laptop and you're putting them on losslessly? You're weird.
First try deleting iTunes Music Library.xml and running iTunes again. If that doesn't work, delete iTunes Library. If that doesn't work, remove and reinstall iTunes, then point it at the music directory on your external drive. I believe it will recreate the indexing. If it doesn't, you can either do "consolidate music library" or drag the whole dang music folder onto iTunes (assuming you have enough drive space).
I didn't actually test any of these things, so who knows, but none of it involves potentially or actually deleting music, so it shouldn't hurt anything.
My solution: starting itunes while holding the option key prompts it to ask you to select a new library. So I just re-chose the external drive.
Dang. I was this close to getting my trojan installed.
I think the problem might have been caused by choosing the folder "itunes music" rather than "itunes" originally. The latter contains the former and also the "itunes library" file that, uh, might do something.
Where did he say he was doing this losslessly?
Every "Ask the Mineshaft" should have this format.
Post: an elaborate statement of a problem, including ways in which "simple solutions" didn't work.
First Post, by the author: "Never mind!"
Where did he say he was doing this losslessly?
I read it in your email.
Ben, if I didn't do it losslessly I'd forever be listening to this music in a substandard format. Now instead of listening to music I'm sobbing quietly in the dark. See the improvement?
Now instead of listening to music I'm sobbing quietly in the dark
Oh, I love that record.
What made this even more fun: I wanted to check that these files were really on the external drive, so I had to go into the folders and confirm...oh, wait, classical CDs are filed in annoying ways, e.g., disc one of Wozzeck is under "Herbert Kegel" and the second is under "Kegel." So that was a fun moment of fear and anger.
An entertaining Kegel exercise, eh?
iTunes really can't index classical worth a damn. Doesn't bother me much, since all my classical is under "Wendy Carlos" or "Isao Tomita", but it's pretty stupid.
iTunes isn't too hot on the jazz either. Individual musicians who record in different ensembles don't track well.
5: Sunday afternoon we're baking on the sidewalk outside a local breakfast place that's a prime target of the church set and thus very crowded. As we wait for our table I glance at a USA Today; there's a sidebar about some football team somewhere whose quarterback is good at throwing the ball to other people. Apparently this is important to their overall hopes for the season and USA Today wants to make sure I know this. At the same time they want to make sure I don't think their analysis too shallow and so it goes on to say, "but the Trojans are loaded in other ways." I die laughing. The end.
tbh, I prefer both Foobar2000 and Winamp to iTunes. Both index better and both play a wider range of music formats. I do like the iTunes UI though.
I've begun ripping my CDs to lossless rather than MP3. I realised I had a 250GB drive that had about 30GB of music on it and that even if I ripped every CD I own to wavpack or flac, I'd still have space for more. Ripping to lossless was certainly quicker (it seemed).
You should steal more music, ttaM.
re: 20
Not pure as driven snow, or nuffink. But tend to be fairly ruthless about what I keep. Until recently I only had a small disk, and deleted anything I didn't really like [and usually ended up buying copies of much of that anyway].
When I first started loading my I-tunes, the first two CDs were Russian opera offbrands which hadn't been entered properly, with the result that the order of the parts was scrambled.
I had been putting my music on losslessly, but quickly ran into the "which arbitrary tracks shall I exclude from my portable music device?" problem. I've since re-encoded it lossfully at some absurdly high bitrate such that only Audiophile Satan could distinguish it from the original. Much better.
Ditto 23.
I'm annoyed that I haven't been able to convince iTunes to load music for one library to my home drive, and music for another library to my external. If there's a way to do it, I'd still like to know, even though I'll be even more annoyed somebody else figured it out and I didn't.
23: if you're using iTunes you can create a smart playlist that picks a random selection of songs of exactly the size as your ipod, and then recreating every time you get bored with the iPod (orotherportablemusicplayer) selection.
Sifu--check your e-mail. Is something happening tonight?