I keep all my media (music, TV, movies, etc) on my media center or home theatre PC. But I connect my iTouch to a different computer. So of course I have to have some network drives mapped to my media PC to sync all my music.
This works fine, until you rebuild your media PC and happen to change the name of the shares you use to share your media. Well sort of.
It turns out that I had some how got some music into my iTunes library using F: drive and some using a UNC path. So when I changed the name of the share and then remapped my drive, all the songs pointing to F: where OK but anything pointing to \\mediapc\d-drive were broken.
Now iTunes is a great program and gives you lots of fields you can display and edit. But the file path is not one of them, which has always bugged me. So how do you change the path to a mass of songs?
What you basically have to do is:
- Export your library (File | Library | Export Library)
- Edit the XML file
- Move/delete your current library files (See Apple support link)
- Import the library file as a playlist (File | Library | Import Playlist)
You can find more detailed instructions at the Apple support site under How to re-create your iTunes library and playlists.
NOTE : It appears that you “lose” any application you have in your library that aren’t installed on your iPod when you do this. They might still be on my hard drive, I haven’t checked yet. But if I can remember what they were I can also download them again for free, so no big lose I guess.
You also appear to lose your genius information, if you use it. So you have to turn that back on and let it do its thing.