Cool Cherry Cream

I’ve done this quite a few times. Moving files from the C drive, to the D drive, to the G drive, and now the K drive. My music folder has been located everywhere. But when I’m panicking and thinking “oh my god, what if I can’t get the library back?”, I never think to write down what I did to fix it.

Deal is, I’ve already moved my files. I ain’t movin’ ‘em back and letting iTunes move ‘em back again. Nuh-uh.

And I ain’t losing my “date added” information. Hell no. I like knowing that I first heard “Led Zeppelin IV” on September 29, 2006 (wow, was it really that long ago?). But all the solutions I’ve found seem to think that this is the only way to do it, you’re just going to have to lose that information.

Well, that ain’t happening.

First off, for this to work, you need to have your iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml files saved. I would also back these files up somewhere else and don’t touch them, in case anything goes wrong.

Note: I let iTunes organize my folders, so I’m not sure if this will work if you don’t have that option enabled, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.

1. Open the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file (or iTunes Library.xml, just make sure it’s the XML file) in Notepad.

   Note: It may take awhile to open, but if you don’t touch anything, it will eventually load.

2. Do a Search and Replace and change every instance of the original drive/folder location to the new location. I changed mine from “C:/My%20Music” to “K:/My%20Music”. (Note that spaces in folder names are represented by “%20″.)

   Note: Search and Replace will take a long time in Notepad. I did my Search and Replace in FrontPage (in CODE view) instead, and it was much quicker. I say to use Notepad however, because something like Microsoft Word may insert other characters into the file and that will mess it up. You can use FrontPage as well, but I would suggest only using code view. If you don’t know how to do that, again, just be patient with Notepad.

3. Save “iTunes Music Library.xml”.
4. Open iTunes. You should now see your music!

   Note: Trying to play anything will result in the dreaded grey question mark. Don’t worry, this will be fixed soon enough.

5. Go to Edit > Preferences.
6. Go to the Advanced tab.
7. Go to the General tab.
8. Change “iTunes Music folder location” to the location of your music. Mine is “K:/My Music”.
9. Click OK.
10. You should see a message box that says something like “Updating your library…”. When this message goes away, your files should now play properly.