I lost all of my Itunes music because of an infection that required them to wipe my computer. I am trying to get the music back from multiple sources. What I have recovered is a mess. Albums are mixed or songs not grouped as album. Help?

Question

My computer got infected with some terrible virus.  I contacted the manufacturer and they said the only thing to do was wipe the whole thing. I could not back it up bec this mess?ause it would include the infection. I have been trying to recover the lost music from several different places.  A friend tried to help me by putting all of his music on my computer from his external hard drive. That was very nice of him but now it is a terrible mess. The recovered songs are not grouped into albums correctly.  Some albums are mixed - every other song is from the other album.  Some songs are listed separately and not grouped as an album.  I tried to ask iTunes to find album art work and it has been running that for over 48 hours. Is that possible?  When I try to stop it I get a message that says I will lose all the data.  I admit that I am not very tech. savvy and I really don't know what I am doing.  It took me more than 20 years to make that collection and I am heart broken. Do you have any ideas about how I start to fix

Answer 1

Unfortunately you've discovered too late how important it is to maintain an up-to-date backup of your iTunes library (and all other data of value).  You could, before wiping the drive, have considered making use of a commercial data recovery service that could (albeit at considerable cost) have extracted your library from the hard disk, even if virus infected.
In the absence of that option, you will need to restore the content of your library from its original sources:
Depending on your location, you may be able to re-download any iTunes Store purchases that are still available on the Store
Likewise, most digital purchases from Amazon (including auto-rip copies of purchased CDs) should be available from the Amazon Cloud and via the Amazon Music application - the same may be true of other commercial sources for digital downloads
Content imported from your CDs will have to imported again
The specific situation that you describe regarding the music imported from your friend's external HDD suggests that either the source is badly organized and/or originates from a source other than iTunes (other media players may use alternative tags for information like artist, title, album, etc. that are not wholly consistent with how iTunes handle these).  Without details of the issues you're seeing it is difficult to suggest a remedy other than going through the media album-by-album, track-by-track, and correcting the inconsistencies.
In the absence of a backup or access to the original library data there is no option other than painstakingly recreating your library as described above.  As you do so, you'll now realize how important creating and maintaining backups are - in my case I have at all times three separate duplicates of my library, in two different locations, where none is ever more than a week old compared to the content of my master library.