I am having two very big problems. The first is that we have outgrown the hard drive on our laptop, and want to buy a new one. We have spent days or weeks rating & adding comments for about 9000 songs. I have tried moving the library to an external hard drive or to a different laptop many times using procedures found at the Apple site, & here at iLounge. Unfortunately, despite being assured that each method would move our entire Library - including ratings, comments and last played information - I have not been able to successfully transfer the ratings & comments, etc. The strangest part is that one time, a handful of the ratings and comments transferred, but not most of them (this tells me it's possible, but makes this more confusing). I have tried all the methods mentiones at this site & Apple, including just copying the XML & itl files, importing them, etc. Nothing seems to work. If I can't find a way to do this, days or weeks of work will have been for nothing (I'm not exagerrating). This is the main reason we decided to go with iTunes and digital - this categorization capability for the Smart Playlists.
Now I have an even more pressing problem. I moved all of our music to an external hard drive, and had been able to run iTunes in the past this way (from the original laptop with the hard drive attached) w/o having any problems. Now, however, any song we click on gives us the "... could not be used because the original file could not be found ..." message. So to play the music we have to locate each song individually, which would not be a good thing with 9,000 songs! I tried dragging the music back onto the C drive, or dragging it from the ext drive folder into the iTunes library, and I just get duplicates of songs it can't find.
PLEASE, I'm begging for any help anyone can offer for these problems. Especially the second one. Thanks so much!
Now I have an even more pressing problem. I moved all of our music to an external hard drive, and had been able to run iTunes in the past this way (from the original laptop with the hard drive attached) w/o having any problems. Now, however, any song we click on gives us the "... could not be used because the original file could not be found ..." message. So to play the music we have to locate each song individually, which would not be a good thing with 9,000 songs! I tried dragging the music back onto the C drive, or dragging it from the ext drive folder into the iTunes library, and I just get duplicates of songs it can't find.
PLEASE, I'm begging for any help anyone can offer for these problems. Especially the second one. Thanks so much!