Several of our clients (www.podserve.co.uk) have reached the stage where their music libraries are larger than their hard drive on their laptop or PC. So, more and more people are looking to store their music on a separate hard drive, and it particularly suits people with second homes as it allows them to take their msuic with them.
Music library on a USB connected hard drive is a simple system on our Macs. Just plug the disc in, no problems. Leave the drive unplugged, no problem.
Windows? Oh, no. If you open iTunes even once without your hard drive being connected it loses all links between its internal libraries (the itl and itx files) and the real location of your music. You see a swathe of grey exclamation marks, against every track. You can't play your music, your iPod doesn't synch properly. The 'cure' is to reload all your tracks. Not only does this take time, but it means you lose the contents of all your (simple) playlists. Small consolation in that smart playlists rebuild themselves.
Twice in the last few days we've had to fix this problem for clients, neither of whom were happy that their hard built playlists had gone.
So, if your music is on a free standing hard drive - you must hae your drive connected and powered on BEFORE you open iTunes. Each and every time. Please don't blame podServe, Apple or iTunes. This is down to Microsoft and I'm afraid I don't know a work-around.
No comments:
Post a Comment