Hello everyone,
This post may be kind of vague since I'm still not entirely sure what happened, so bear with me. Basically, I went to open my iTunes tonight and received a message that it was re-importing my library. I let it go to finish, but when I came back I realized that it was stuck on a certain point (I got the spinning color wheel) which it would not move past, so I had to force quit iTunes.
After opening iTunes, my entire library was missing. I went to the Apple site and followed the instructions of this help article about re-creating iTunes library and playlists, but whenever I followed the instructions in it (such as loading a past library, even one from several months ago) I kept getting the spinning color wheel and would have to shut down iTunes (or even the computer itself in some cases just because the entire computer froze).
I still have my iTunes media folder with all of the music files themselves, but I read on another forum to be very careful about re-organizing libraries and such so that these files don't get lost in the shuffle. Basically at this point I am assuming I'll just need/want to start fresh with a brand new iTunes library, which I have tried doing by hitting "Option" when I open iTunes and creating a new iTunes library -- but when I drag and drop the music files into the newly created folder, it attempts to copy them all instead of replacing them which is a problem considering I have 25 GB of music and only about 10 GB left of hard drive space (I've been working on cleaning it off over break though).
So basically, my question is exactly how best to go about starting fresh so that I can re-import all of my music files. I saw some sites that suggestd a clean un-install and re-install, but wasn't sure what that would do to my album artwork, etc.
This is what my current file window looks like when I go to Username ---> Music ---> iTunes (note that the second folder on the top row labelled "iTunes" is what I called the newly created library after hitting "option" and creating a library).
I have no idea what is safe to delete, what will mess up my files, etc., so I thought it would be best to ask here.
So yes, any advice would be much appreciated since I'm clearly a bit frazzled and am afraid to do anything myself out of fear of losing my files -- I *had* a playlist of songs for the Christmas party I'm hosting tonight, so I'd love to get this taken care of so that I can get it back together in time!
Thanks!
This post may be kind of vague since I'm still not entirely sure what happened, so bear with me. Basically, I went to open my iTunes tonight and received a message that it was re-importing my library. I let it go to finish, but when I came back I realized that it was stuck on a certain point (I got the spinning color wheel) which it would not move past, so I had to force quit iTunes.
After opening iTunes, my entire library was missing. I went to the Apple site and followed the instructions of this help article about re-creating iTunes library and playlists, but whenever I followed the instructions in it (such as loading a past library, even one from several months ago) I kept getting the spinning color wheel and would have to shut down iTunes (or even the computer itself in some cases just because the entire computer froze).
I still have my iTunes media folder with all of the music files themselves, but I read on another forum to be very careful about re-organizing libraries and such so that these files don't get lost in the shuffle. Basically at this point I am assuming I'll just need/want to start fresh with a brand new iTunes library, which I have tried doing by hitting "Option" when I open iTunes and creating a new iTunes library -- but when I drag and drop the music files into the newly created folder, it attempts to copy them all instead of replacing them which is a problem considering I have 25 GB of music and only about 10 GB left of hard drive space (I've been working on cleaning it off over break though).
So basically, my question is exactly how best to go about starting fresh so that I can re-import all of my music files. I saw some sites that suggestd a clean un-install and re-install, but wasn't sure what that would do to my album artwork, etc.
This is what my current file window looks like when I go to Username ---> Music ---> iTunes (note that the second folder on the top row labelled "iTunes" is what I called the newly created library after hitting "option" and creating a library).
I have no idea what is safe to delete, what will mess up my files, etc., so I thought it would be best to ask here.
So yes, any advice would be much appreciated since I'm clearly a bit frazzled and am afraid to do anything myself out of fear of losing my files -- I *had* a playlist of songs for the Christmas party I'm hosting tonight, so I'd love to get this taken care of so that I can get it back together in time!
Thanks!
