mjzee

Got the disc in the mail today, in good condition.

OK, so right now the Library.itl file is in the Music/iTunes folder. I guess I should take any other Library.itl files and rename them "old" or something like that, so there's only one "official" Library.itl file.

I assume you used the eMusic Download Manager program. Does it specify to where it saves music files? As for contacting them, try the message boards there.

I hope all goes well for your grandson.

Well, I think I have a happy ending to my saga. I found another version of the "iTunes Library.itl" file, and when I opened it (by opening iTunes while holding down the option key, and then selecting this .itl file), it was the most up-to-date version, including all my playlists. It was like seeing an old friend again. I think one problem with iTunes is it doesn't tell you the location of the .itl file it's using; under "Preferences" you can specify the location of the iTunes Media folder, but not the location of the .itl file. Therefore, over time, it seems to scatter .itl files in various places on your hard drive. Now that I know the location of the .itl file I want, I'd like to move it to a more obvious, findable spot. Do you think there's a risk in moving it?

I learned of this one through the following "correction": "An earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary misidentified the album cover on the bottom left. It is Thelonious Monk’s “Underground,” not “George Szell Conducts Beethoven.” But it's an interesting obituary of an interesting life, and we obviously know most of the covers. Brooklyn! NYT.

Happy birthday, Lee!

Last month, Cory Jones, a top editor at Playboy, went to see its founder Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion. In a wood-paneled dining room, with Picasso and de Kooning prints on the walls, Mr. Jones nervously presented a radical suggestion: the magazine, a leader of the revolution that helped take sex in America from furtive to ubiquitous, should stop publishing images of naked women. Mr. Hefner, now 89, but still listed as editor in chief, agreed. As part of a redesign that will be unveiled next March, the print edition of Playboy will still feature women in provocative poses. But they will no longer be fully nude. Full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/media/nudes-are-old-news-at-playboy.html?_r=0

The winning lot will probably be a politically-correct subset of the nominees. Just determine your ideal proportions.

Good luck in the future, Bev.

I might not subscribe next year...will have my hands full listening to the box.

John: Thanks for the tip. I was able to find a prior iTunes Library.itl file, and find my playlists through June 2014, which I've copied to an Excel file for future reference. Sometime after that must have been when iTunes started saving new additions to a different folder. So some good came out of it.

Be sure and make copies of all of your playlists. I made the mistake of not doing that once and lost them when itunes crashed. It is easy to make copies Select a playlist and go to file - library- export. Then even if itunes fails to recognize your playlists when you switch your default to the external drive, you can just reload them simply (import). John, have you successfully done this before? Because I have a backup of my pre-migration files. My fear is that iTunes won't recognize my new files when I want to switch back.

Note that if you have over 200 gb of music, the cost of iTunes Cloud Storage is $120/year (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238). I'm now inching towards 1 TB, which is how this all started: I needed to migrate to a larger EHD. I don't see whether Apple will even allow you more than 1 TB.

I have to confess, I'm pretty ticked off about the information iTunes lost in the upgrade: Last Played, for example. Totally lost. Or the date an album was added; iTunes now lists last week as when all albums were added. Or various playlists I made for friends, or tracks I want to include in future playlists; all gone. It's a shame because it's those little things that make the iTunes experience so enjoyable; it's disheartening that this data can disappear in a flash. I don't even think there's a way to separately save that data.

Just announced: Dave's Picks Vol. 16 - Springfield, MA, March 28, 1973.

Here's what I understand about how iTunes works: 1) Your music files exist on a folder on a hard drive. They exist independent of iTunes or any other music organization software. 2) When you first start using iTunes, it asks where your music files are located. It then builds its own index of those files (in a file it names iTunes Library.itl). That index is what you see when you open iTunes. So, really, iTunes is just a particular way to view your music files, coupled with a convenient way to play them. 3) If you allow it to, it will also organize those music files for you. It prefers that you allow it to. In that case, it will actually copy your music files: it will create a folder (which it names iTunes Media) and subfolders for each artist. So if you have Joe Albany albums in 3 different folders on two different hard drives, it will copy them all to one folder named Joe Albany, which is a subfolder under iTunes Media. 4) If, when you open iTunes, it cannot find the file iTunes Library.itl, it will ask for your help to find it. >> If it cannot find this file, you will not see any of your music in iTunes. << Your music hasn't been erased; the files are still on the hard drive. It's just that iTunes cannot see them. 5) In my case, after I upgraded to El Capitan, iTunes didn't recognize that .itl file it had created just the day before. I don't know why. Instead of just rebuilding the file, it copied my music files to a new location and then rebuilt the file. Note that it didn't move my music files, it just copied them, which is a good thing; I'd be more concerned if it moved the files, because then I wouldn't know if it lost any. So now I compare my old music file folder to my new one and see a discrepancy in the total number of files, so I need to understand why that's so.

16,164 of those items are now accounted for. There is a folder named Album Artwork that was in my old Music folder but is not in my new one. However, there is an Album Artwork folder in the (EHD) / iTunes folder (on the same level as my iTunes Library.itl file). Since iTunes found and displays my album artwork, I assume this is OK. This leaves 1,887 files unaccounted for, but there might be a similar innocuous explanation for these. Still, I have to check. I miss the days when a manual could explain all this for you. These days, software is updated so frequently that I don't know how printed manuals can keep up. I used to subscribe to Macworld, but they stopped printed magazines, moving to e-publishing, and I found I wasn't reading them.

OK, it's done doing whatever it wanted to do. iTunes copied my entire music collection to the folder (EHD) / iTunes / iTunes Media, which is where all future rips and downloads will go. The iTunes Library.itl file is in (EHD) / iTunes (so it's not in the iTunes Media folder, but rather one folder up). I just now closed iTunes and reopened it, and it found my library, so that's good. However, when I compare the size of my old Music folder and the new one that iTunes just created, I see about 18,000 fewer items in the new file. I'll somehow need to do a comparison of the two folders to see what's missing. Does anyone know of a good utility on the Mac that will do this?

Have a greasy birthday!

Yes, it was (before the El Capitan upgrade); it's now pointing somewhere else, based on what today's tech support guy said. Yes, but that option is only for additions to the collection going forward. I'll be able to to discuss more concretely once iTunes finishes loading my collection.

Sometime last year, probably after an iTunes upgrade, I found that iTunes was copying my newly-ripped music to a different folder than I had it do to date. I only realized this a few months after the change occurred. So my music was now split between two different folders. iTunes was keeping track of all this, so I could play all my music, but I knew this was a bad thing that I'd have to take care of at some point. I just didn't want to deal with it, and didn't have to for a long time. The time came, however, when I needed to migrate to a larger external hard drive. I called Apple tech support, and they advised me to copy my music files to the new EHD, then open iTunes while holding down the option key - iTunes would then ask me where my music was, I would point to my new EHD, and all would be fine. So I copied the older music folder, then meticulously combined the newer music folder into the old, then opened iTunes while holding down the option key...and it didn't work. More time spent with Apple tech support. They found some way to load the library (meaning the pointers to the files, not the actual files) into iTunes, and it worked. I was happy. However, yesterday I upgraded my iMac's operating system to El Capitan. Then, when I opened iTunes, it couldn't find my music library. More time spent today with Apple tech support. They had me do something, and I'm now watching iTunes copy all my music into another folder ("iTunes Media") on my EHD. This will take hours, and I don't have confidence that at the end of the process, I will have a functioning iTunes library. I never thought Apple tech support could be hit or miss, but my current experience proves otherwise.

True; I see that now.

It's very possible that Nagel Heyer is unaware of this bootlegging series.

It was terrible to read about his son.