Recreating my massive Itunes library

[cullowhee1932]

Thanks in advance for humoring this question from an old man who was born long before the Age of Technology. In one sentence, I am recreating my massive Itunes library after the collapse of my Seagate and would like to know the easiest way to do it.

I have a collection of about 60,000 songs, mostly pre-1960 recordings I transferred over many years from my vinyl collection. It is a large and cumbersome library. I moved some of my collection to a Seagate cloud drive and used that as my Itunes folder. Unfortunately, the drive collapsed- luckily, I have all of my music backed up in many other places and have iCloud music library, so it is mostly matched or uploaded. I bought a Synology NAS drive and have copied all the different music folders onto the NAS drive, which now has everything.

What is the easiest way to reintroduce my massive library to Itunes, since (1) the location has changed and (2) many of the edits to the titles, etc., will be inconsistent with the raw music files. The music on the new Synology is all pretty disorganized and a mess.

Is there a good service to reorganize it that can handle such a large library?I am willing to pay for it if there are good programs that organize music.

Would really appreciate thoughts on the easiest way to do it- I am technologically illiterate but my old music is my life!

 

[Tartarus]

Create a virtual harddrive with the exact path of your former library and copy all your music in there.
And then whenever you come across a song that is incorrect or wrong, take it one at a time to fix it.
Fixing them all at once can be very overwhelming and time consuming.

 

[cullowhee1932]

Thank you, Ambassador Tartarus! A few quesitions:
1) Do I check that organize / consolidate files option?
2) Tartarus, where do I put all my music? In the file named ITUNES/ITUNES MEDIA/MUSIC?
3) Does it matter if it is a disorganized mess when I dump it in that file?
Thanks so much, sir.

 

[Tartarus]

Thank you, Ambassador Tartarus! A few quesitions:
1) Do I check that organize / consolidate files option?
2) Tartarus, where do I put all my music? In the file named ITUNES/ITUNES MEDIA/MUSIC?
3) Does it matter if it is a disorganized mess when I dump it in that file?
Thanks so much, sir.

Scratch everything I just said.
Start from the beginning and simply import all your songs to iTunes.

It seems like I am way in over my head trying to assist in this matter. My apologies.

 

[cullowhee1932]

Thank you!

 

[kataran]

Welcome to iMore

If you find the time we would like to know how your music collection is progressing Along

I also had an iTunes music breakdown and still haven’t fully recovered. The struggle is Real

 

[Annie_M]

I have nothing more to add to this discussion, but I wanted to welcome you to iMore! I second the comment made by @kataran. We’d love to know how things work out for you.

 

[cullowhee1932]

Thank you for this lovely welcome, Ambassador Kataran and Annie. I spent about ten years ripping all of my vinyl collection to a digital format. Now, 10 years later, much of what was once very rare is now available on youtube, etc.. Not sure it was worth the great effort. Also, using the digital collection has not been as easy as I hoped. I have so many questions that have built up over the years.... and I am embarrassed to ask them, fearing that they reveal my ignorance. For example, I have Apple Music and Icloud Music Library, which means alot of my content was "matched" and not uploaded- although it seems every day, 20 songs that meet that description are rendered "no longer available." Is there any easy way, for example, to go back into my collection and upload what was once passed over because it was "matched"?

 

[Tartarus]

Locate the files that are marked ‘No Longer Available’.
Move the files to a different folder on your computer.
Now delete those songs from your iTunes.
Then simply add / import those songs back to iTunes from the folder you previously moved them to.

iTunes will now see if there is a match available. Since this is not the case anymore (hence the ‘No Longer Available’), those songs will now be uploaded instead of matched.

Also, there is no shame in not knowing.
There is shame in not wanting to learn, of which you’re not guilty.

 

[wilber1]

Thank you for this lovely welcome, Ambassador Kataran and Annie. I spent about ten years ripping all of my vinyl collection to a digital format. Now, 10 years later, much of what was once very rare is now available on youtube, etc.. Not sure it was worth the great effort. Also, using the digital collection has not been as easy as I hoped. I have so many questions that have built up over the years.... and I am embarrassed to ask them, fearing that they reveal my ignorance. For example, I have Apple Music and Icloud Music Library, which means alot of my content was "matched" and not uploaded- although it seems every day, 20 songs that meet that description are rendered "no longer available." Is there any easy way, for example, to go back into my collection and upload what was once passed over because it was "matched"?

One thing I have noticed the old vinyl and cd recordings that are now on Youtube mostly are remastered and sound a lot better than the old recordings .

 

[cullowhee1932]

Ambassador, thank you for your kind words. When you say "move the files to a different folder", is there an easy way to do that? There are probably 3000 of them. Thanks

 

[cullowhee1932]

Yes, there are a lot of people out there with great equipment. Does anyone recommend Itunes library cleaning software?