link, you're dead to me: a guide on how to remove broken/dead links from your iTunes library.

as you all know, i've experienced quite a lot of computer troubles lately. clarence (yes, the computer has a name...), spent quite a long time in the office of information and technology as some dedicated techs agreed to help a very grateful college student. luckily, none of my files were lost. but as is often the case (after vista craps out), it had to be set back to factory settings.

in rummaging through the rubble of my once proud computer, i had to re-download many of the basic programs that i had taken for granted before my recent scare. upon re-downloading iTunes 8.1, all of the music that was stored on my computer was re-added to my library. unbeknownst to me however, the library kept all of my old files! this left the old ones as dead/broken links. because i have over 10,000 songs, the addition of a live link for every broken one gave my library a deceptive appearance registering well over 20,000 songs!

to make things even more annoying, the only way one can tell which links are dead and which ones are live is to click on them (only the live links will play), and this can only be accomplished through a long one by one step process. after the dead links are found, a tiny grey ! appears to the left of each track name (signaling their inability to trace back to the file location on the disk). unfortunately, iTunes doesn't have an easy way to delete these files on a large scale.

...or does it?!

after scouring the internet with the hope of being able to bail myself out of this mind-numbingly tedious project of grandiose proportions, i came across an ingenious way of dealing with such a problem:
1. make a smart playlist called "all files" with this rule: "artist" is not "123456789" (or any nonsense name that won't be in your library).

2. make a static playlist called "all live files".

3. make a smart playlist called "all missing files" with these rules: match all of the following rules, playlist is "all files", playlist is not "all live files".

4. select all the files from "all files" and drag them into "all live files". the dead files marked (!) will not copy over.

as a side note: (...you might have to move the files by groupings. since i was dealing with over 20,000 at once, it was much easier to move them in blocks of 5,000).

5. "missing files" will contain all of your dead files. select all and delete. shazaam!! a nice clean iTunes library!

if the problem persists, you can keep these three playlists in their own special folder and repeat the necessary steps to keep your library up to mr. clean's standards.

in order to delete the files from within a playlist: one must hold down shift+delete (for windows), and option+delete (for macs).

god bless the invention of smart playlists. they really have pulled me out of a number of jams. many thanks to paul mayne for his hard work in uncovering this method.

until next time,
best.
j-bigs


no. 9 so fiiine!