Frustrated with importing iTunes library to a second PC

Question

Hello,
I have a very large iTunes library on my home PC, which contains extensive playlists and ratings. I have always had a second copy of my library on an external hard drive which I use at work, and have always been able to copy the iTunes library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml files over to the work PC every time I updated my external hard drive.
I have today upgraded my work PC to a Windows 7 workstation, and have installed the latest version of iTunes. I made a fresh copy of my iTunes library onto my external hard drive (I spent a lot of time this past week digitizing about 20 record albums). I copied over the iTunes library itl and xml files.
I've had absolutely no luck with this. I've tried setting up iTunes to point to the external drive as the place where the music is located, and I've tried copying everything to the workstation's C drive where iTunes would expect it to be by default. Nothing seems to be working - every song on my playlist has the exclamation point next to it saying iTunes cannot find the file. I've noticed that the file location that iTunes gives for each song is usually incorrect in some way - most of the time, iTunes thinks the file path to each song starts with File:\\LocalHost before going to the actual file path.
I have tried editing the xml file to make sure the path is correct, and then importing the xml file - and when it does that, it appears to have the correct location for each file, and the exclamation points are gone - but when I try to play a song, I get a status bar saying "opening URL" and then nothing happens. And, instead of the exclamation mark next to each song, I now have the symbol you see next to a Podcast (sorry, don't know what it is called.)
I have also tried just letting iTunes rebuild the library based on the files I copied to the C drive, but this is not an acceptable solution because none of the playlists or ratings carry over. And, as the library has well over 15,000 items in it, (all of my CD collection and about half of my vinyl collection), I cannot sit there and manually point to each song, either.
Does anyone have any hints about where I can go from here?

Answer 1

Hi there...
The file://localhost bit it telling you where iTunes "thinks" the file should be and that it doesn't appear to be there. Depending on how you messed around with things you could have created the situation where iTunes had two links to the same physical file. Cleaning one "duplicate" breaks the remaining entry. There is also a situation where a setting gets changed causing iTunes to "think" that files are in the pre-iTunes 9 layout, when they are in the new one, or vice-versa. Comparing the expected location with the true one may reveal if that is the problem, or if some other manual folder move needs to be undone.
If the tracks can be found somewhere, and they are in a reasonably sensible structure, my script FindTracks can often reconnect them to iTunes.
As for deduping...
Apple's official advice is here... HT2905 - How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library. It is a manual process and the article fails to explain some of the potential pitfalls.
Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created.  If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin.
Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.
(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed)
BTW the links to my older posts are working for me.
tt2