Sunday, February 24, 2008

How to Remove Broken/Dead iTunes links

I originally tried the idea below by Paul Mayne (thank you) but now I just delete ALL the links and then go to File and Add Folder again. All my music is in one central folder and seeing as moving music results in lost dead links and lost *rankings* I figure it's just easier to re-add the folder.
clipped from www.paulmayne.org

1. Make a smart playlist called “All Files” with this rule: “Artist” is not “123456789″ (or any nonsense name that won’t be in your library).

2. Make a static playlist called “All Live Files”.

3. Make a smart playlist called “Missing Files” with these rules: Match all of the following rules, Playlist is “All Files”, Playlist is not “All Live Files”

4. Select all the files from “All Files” and drag them into “All Live Files”. The dead files marked (!) will not copy over.

5. “Missing Files” will contain all of your dead files. Select all and delete. Voila, a nice clean iTunes library.

I have these three playlists in their own folder. Whenever I gather more than a couple dead tracks for whatever reason, I delete all the tracks in “All Live Files” and repeat steps 4 and 5.

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