Today, I’m going to guide you in remove broken track links from iTunes Library. During my recent Windows 7 rebuild, I made a number of back ups and restores and during that process I mess up iTunes Library. Some files were in iTunes Library but not in Windows explorer. Eventually I end up up with everything I need but with minor complications that it was fixable with a simple java script from Apple.
Now, we to tell iTunes to take a look at itself, and remove any items in the library which no longer exist. Unfortunately there is no simple way in the iTunes interface to do this, so we need to cheat, just a little.
Apple has provided a script to do just this particular trick, and to make use of it you just need to do these things in the following order.
The error message when files are missing:
Steps in fixing it:
- Close iTunes if you have it open
- Download RemoveDeadTracks.zip (it is a compressed file)
- Extract the compressed (the one that you download) and this will give a file called RemoveDeadTracks.js
- Right Click on File and select “Open with Command Prompt”
- Now, you may get an message like the one below, just click Continue
- This will open iTunes and you will see your tracks that has no files associated disappear. Now, you can close iTunes and re-open and it should be back to normal.
In my case it took around five minutes and correctly removed nearly one thousand broken links. Now give yourself a pat on the back because your are an expert in removing broken track links from your iTunes Library.
In Windows 8 you have to download the right version of Java (64 or 32bit) and then make sure you right-click on RemoveDeadTracks.js and then open with “Microsoft Windows Based Script Host”. It work just fine for me.
Much better to run a 3rd party utility, because many of those missing tracks might actually still have their corresponding files lying around in your music library folders, only iTunes has lost the connection between them. There’s one called Song Sergeant that will scan for all sorts of problems and it will hook up missing tracks to these misplaced files for free. You only need to buy it if you want to fix the other kinds of problems that it finds.