Wednesday, August 29, 2012

If your iTunes songs are getting cut off...

...you may have a very simple solution.

I just moved my iTunes library to a new machine and found that a huge number of my ITMS purchased sons would cut off at odd points in the song (but for songs from the same album THEY ALWAYS CUT OFF AT THE SAME PLACE - oh iTunes how I sometimes hate you... ;) )

Anyhow, I chanced upon a solution to this (which I gleaned from a post 30 posts deep in an apple forum) which requires you to create a new music library and simply import your previous library into it.  This sounds complicated but it is, in fact, quite simple.

To do this, I held down the shift key (either one should work) when starting iTunes and iTunes gave me a little dialog allowing me to create a "new Library" which I did right next to my old one.  Then, after iTunes opened onto this new and empty library, I simply chose File|Library|Import Playlist and located my old library's base "iTunes Music Library.xml" file and imported that - bingo, it imported everything from my previous library.

After validating that this worked, and that my music was now playing properly, I consolidated all my files into my new library folder.

Hope this helps someone the way it helped me.

By the way, I believe that on OSX you hold down the option key when starting iTunes to replicate this approach.