iTunes problem - songs in library not downloading

[Gilli]

Hope someone can help in plain English ..... have looked at Apple site & forums without getting a straight answer to what seems to be my situation.

My brother in law recently gave me a CD onto which he'd burned several albums. I transferred these to iTunes (by dragging & dropping folders) and also to my iTunes folder in My Music on the PC.

So far, so good .... all the track details appear in iTunes as they should.

However, when I tried to update my iPod got message that xx songs could not be transferred as they couldn't be found. All the music from this disk seems affected.

At the same time, had downloaded other music with no problems. Obviously appreciate these aren't the original disks but have put stuff in iTunes before with no problem.

Dunno if this is relevant but also downloaded latest 4.8 iTunes shortly before.

[PlainJane]

Try going to iTunes, FIle>Import and then selecting the songs and importing them to iTunes

[fo3nix]

your problem is that by dragging in or just importing mp3 files, it's still linking to them from the CD. and i bet the CD isn't in the drive when you try and play them, so it cant find them.

Solution: put CD in drive and they should play. Then, goto advanced -> consolidate library.

If you have any problems with the tracks skipping and things (you might if your computer is about 6 years old or so), then copy mp3 files from CD to hard-drive then import files from hard drive. then consolidate library. don't do this unless you need to though, will probably be unneccessary.

[Gilli]

That's brilliant - thankyou so much. So straightforward when you know how.

Though still a little baffled as to how I've managed to import other mp3 files successfully in the past ?? Goodness knows what I did then.

Anyhow, know what to do now .... have over 200 new songs on iPod !

[fo3nix]

iTunes has its own area on your computer for its files, but it will play files from other locations too.

this is typically c:\documents and settings\[username]\my documents\my music\itunes\itunes music

if you import an audio CD, then itunes automatically stores these files in that folder. if you just import from mp3s, like on your CD, then it simply loads them into itunes but doesn't move them over to its own folder (you might not want this). if you want to put all songs in your itunes list to its own special folder, then consolidate the library. this of course creates a copy of the other music if its from another location on your hard drive. so delete that other music if you like.

if you've imported files from an audio CD, as i said it will have done this automatically so you wont have had that problem.

if you want itunes to automatically consolidate music for you, in itunes goto edit -> preferences -> advanced -> tick the box "copy files to itunes music folder when importing"