After years of working properly and well, iTunes suddenly can't see spanned movies.

Thank you for getting back to me and there's nothing to be sorry about as all the files are still there so it's just a matter of getting all the components to reconnect. I should apologise because I'd forgotten you have an old email address on file for me so it took me a day or so to find your response. Which, again, I very much appreciate.

I'm running macOS Mojave 10.14.6 on a late 2013 iMac with a 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 32GB 1600 MHz DDR3 memory.

I've TuneSpanned my rather large library of movies to a 4TB Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Western Digital external hard drive. The external drive is always connected and I usually have iTunes open so I don't believe that's an issue here.

How to explain this? The media files in question, which is those that used to be viewable in itunes after being spanned to the WD external hard drive, don't now show up in Tunespan--but they're all still intact and available on the external drive in the folder structure set for them. If that makes sense.

The only movie files viewable in TuneSpan at the moment are those I keep in a queue under the Home Videos section in iTunes (version 12.9.5.5). I do this because I span them when I movie them from Home Videos to movies, and since the external drive is so crowded I have to delete something before I can add something, if this also makes sense.

In any event, here's a screen shot of what's currently viewable in Tunespan. Please note that the iTunes library itself is on the external drive iTunes Library (also WD), and the files in question are on the WD external drive named Movies & TV.

One final thing here: I know the TuneSpan process still works, as I deleted a movie from the Movies & TV external drive and then re-added it to iTunes and spanned it to that drive. I'm hoping to avoid having to do that with all the nearly 3,000 films on the drive.

All best, Eddie

ends

Thanks for this extra info and screenshot.

So it sounds like somehow the tracks in question were removed from iTunes. That is odd and not something that TuneSpan has the capability to do, so I'm not sure how that would have happened.

But, you can easily add them back to iTunes from their current location without having to copy anything back and forth.

To get them into iTunes without having them moved to your default iTunes Media location, you can go into the Advanced iTunes Preferences and turn off the "Copy Media to default library location when importing" option before dragging your media into iTunes. And then after its imported, you can turn that option back on for normal use.

Thank you very much, I'll try this and let you know how I go.

Just so I'm clear (sorry, I'm kind of slow at this), once I've turned off "Copy media to default library location when importing," do I still have to add the films to iTunes one by one from the external drive, or does "dragging your media into iTunes" mean I can just drag the folder called Movies in the Spanned Media folder on my external drive into iTunes?

Oh, and let me be clear that I never thought TuneSpan itself was at fault here, I'm sure this is something I did that caused the mess. I'm just hoping it doesn't take too long to clean that mess up...

This is a terrific program and I recommend it to all my friends.

Thank you and all best, Eddie

ends

You can drag-and-drop the whole folder into iTunes.