Media hard drive died

Ryan Meyer shared this question 7 years ago
Answered

My media hard drive died :( All the media is now gone that shows up in iTunes. iTunes thinks that they should be in the iTunes folder, but obviously they are not, they have been spanned to the drive that no longer works. How do I clean up my iTunes. I use Itunes match, so all my music is in the cloud, but itunes thinks that the files are still on the hard drive, so I am unable to download again until it realizes that they are gone.

Replies (2)

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Thanks for getting in touch. I'm so sorry to hear that your hard drive died, but so glad that all your media is safe in iTunes Match!


So, to be able to re-download the stuff from iTunes Match, you'll simply need to delete all the missing tracks from iTunes. If you highlight your missing tracks and delete them (not remove from library) it will just delete the local reference and still have the iTunes Match reference that you can re-download. Try this with just one track first to make sure you understand the dialog that iTunes will present. I'm not sure exactly with one, but there should be an option to just delete the local reference and not remove the track from your library all together. iTunes can be a bit confusing with this stuff since there are so many different things going on now with local and cloud tracks.


It could be that since the local files are already missing, that iTunes will just delete the local reference without an alert and then you'll see the little cloud icon next to the track to be able to re-download it.

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Thanks, that worked. I did the same with all my other media but had to filter through it quite a bit because some had not been spanned yet. I actually had to delete the video files because they are not included in iTunes Match. Thanks for the help.

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