ITunes lost 1000s of songs and song ratings on transfer from old PC to new one

[topcattim]

I recently bought a new PC and have transferred my iTunes library from the old to the new one. I made sure to consolidate the library first, and I simply copied the iTunes folder from my old PC's Music folder onto an external hard drive and then into the Music folder of the new one. The new PC's ITunes knows which folder to store and look for music and pulled in several 1000 of the songs, complete with ratings and playlists.

But strangely not all of them. I discovered that those that I saved in the last couple of years were not automatically found by ITunes in its initial set up. I've got iTunes to find them by searching in the folder, so they are now in the new library, but they have lost their ratings, and more importantly the "date added" in the meta-data is this week, meaning that none of my smart playlists (designed to cycle through my more recent songs more often than my older ones) are working.

I figure this is because new ITunes is somehow using an old database of songs, but I'm not sure how to get it to use the correct one that must somehow be stored somewhere on the old PC. I could just delete and try again, but I'm a bit unwilling to do this unless I know it will work, as ITunes messed up the podcast transfer and I had to spend several hours manually sorting all of that out as well. Again, that suggests a problem with database transfer, but I'm not sure how to resolve that.

Grateful for any help, thanks

 

[cjmnews]

On the old PC, you need to find the library file, which may not have the default name.
Edit->Preferences, Advanced and see what the path and name are in the upper half of the window.

If the path was in your Music\iTunes folder then all you need to do is change the file on the new PC.
If the path was different, then you should copy the file to the new PC (I would put it in the Music\iTunes folder for next migration)

Then update the library file in the new PC
Edit->Preferences, Advanced and use the buttons to locate the file. Press OK to save and your library should look like the old one.

Play a track, if it is the same location as the old PC, it will instantly play.
If the location is different you will get a Locate file prompt. Click locate and then navigate where the file should be Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\<Artist>\<Album>\<Song Name>.<extension> then it should ask if the entire library needs to be updated for the new location and you answer YES.
Then all tracks should play.

Podcast transfers suck. Using the correct library file should link up the existing podcasts. I think that if you use the automatic download of all podcasts, it doesn't recognize the ones from the old PC and you get duplicates. They could have fixed this, but I don't know. I stopped using iTunes for podcasts once their Podcast app stopped supporting smart playlists.