Restoring iTunes on Windows Vista / Sensible Configuration for a Traktor DJ

A time consuming problem of the last couple of weeks was caused when my colleagues laptop (a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo PI2515) which he uses for DJing (Traktor LE, plus Spotify & iTunes) reset itself to its factory fresh state and wiped a chunk of his music library (everything on drive c), plus his itunes library and Traktor collection, stripes and playlists. He insists that it rebooted itself during use and that he was not prompted and did nothing. Anyway, the net result for a working DJ at Christmas time was disaster.

There was an existing backup of his iTunes library which I attempted to restore but it appears that iTunes  finds it difficult to relocate tracks once they have been moved, and as the iTunes music collection was split across the C & D drives without full and recent backups it was impossible to restore all files to drive C as they were. I followed a number of different instructions but came to the conclusion that starting again with a fresh collection, and setting everything up properly would be sensible. (It appears that iTunes was copying files when adding thereby creating unneeded duplicates, plus the collections was spread across drive C & D making backing up tricky). This process involved a number of steps which I will detail here.

Step 1). Backup anything and everything before beginning. You may think it can't get worse but it probably can. For iTunes you need to locate the following files which contain your collection information, playlists, ratings, etc.

iTunes Library.itl (used by iTunes)
iTunes Music Library.xml (Used by iTunes to recreate the *.itl file if it is missing, and all other programs)

Note that these files may exist in more than one location so make sure you check in iTunes preferences for the correct file (See image and instructions below). Instructions are for iTunes version 9 for windows.

You can see your iTunes Media Folder Location in the image above. Navigate to this page by selecting Edit --> Preferences and then select the "Advanced" tab.


Step 2) Next step in this instance was to try and enlarge the data drive D and reduce drive C. The purpose for this is to contain the entire music collection in one folder thereby making it easy to backup and also ensuring that if this laptop decided to restore factory settings of windows then the music collection would be safe.

In Vista its relatively easy to change partition sizes as the disk management tool allows for shrinking of volumes and extending volumes. Its far from perfect, but certainly possible. Here's how I did it

Shrink the boot volume drive C. It appears around 50GB is sensible but I found that I couldn't go that low. I set it as small as I could. I will shrink it further but that will come later as time was of the essence and there was now potential for a data drive (D) large enough to store the entire music collection so I continued. I then copied all the remaining music off onto a USB drive, deleted the D volume and created a new volume in Disk Management to fill the now empty space. I could then copy the entire existing collection back onto drive D into a single folder.

HOW TO SHRINK A VOLUME:To access disk manager in Windows Vista open Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management and then in the panel on the left you will see "Disk Management" listed under "Storage" (see image below). To shrink volume C, right click on your C: Drive (labelled Vista C: in the image) and select shrink volume.

Step 3) Once I had my nice new music folder, I had to rid the collection of evil duplicates of which there were 4000 in a collection of 18000. I believe that this can be done quite easily on macs with freeware but we had to purchase Clone Remover from http://www.moleskinsoft.com/... its cheap and works pretty well although you need 2-4 hours for 18k mp3s. It's a useful tool. Best err on the side of caution when deleting files.

Step 4) Having now removed the duplicate files its time to recreate your iTunes music collection. First, delete the .itl & .xml files mentioned in step 1 (which you have already backed up to another location). Open iTunes (for ease of future backups I would advise setting iTunes to store its library on the same drive as your music prior to importing anything) and add the newly cleaned music folder to the collection. You are ready to begin building your playlists again. Making sure (of course) that you regularly backup your entire music collection, including the iTunes itl & xml files.