This will show you how to force iTunes to re-scan your library to fix missing metadata by re-scanning all your music files. You can re-fresh individual files by playing them in iTunes. If you have used an external program to change data and you don’t want to have to play each song to get it to update then this post will show you how.
I’m commenting an old post, but this may help those with LARGE libraries of music and no better alternative than iTunes to get the bloody tunes onto iPhones.
My collection is large enough that I’ve split /Music/mp3/ into 27 subfolders, 0-9, A, B, C, D … thru Z. Each new rip goes in the appropriate AlphaNum folder and that way Bruno Mars gets filed with the M artists even though I’ve tagged all the tracks Bruno Mars–keeping Picard, MusicBrainz, and CDDB happy.
The grief I found with iTunes is that the collection simply didn’t import all the way if I selected Music/mp3 as the folder to import. I’d get the A, B, and some of the C artists, if that. The fix seems to be SELECT ALL 27 subfolders (inside the Music/mp3/ location). This seemed to help iTunes by breaking up the task into 27 smaller chunks.
(I tried to just locate the music in Music/iTunes/iTunesMedia/AutomaticallyAddedToiTunes, but iTunes did some strange things to this folder even though I’ve told it NOT to manage my music for me. This folder seems to have some strange permissions at play, preventing me from even copying some files into that folder. Too bad, that would’ve been the most elegant solution…)
Thanks :)
I’ve added the info to the main post so that it can help others