Hi,
I've been working on upgrading the harddrive in a friends laptop for the sole purpose of adding another 30-40gb of music into his database. After getting the drive cloned successfully, I added a folder (55gb) of music into the the library with the "Add folder to Library" menu item. It took over 8 hours to process/convert the wma's into whatever they get converted too. However, it only added 2gb of music (400 tracks) into his collection. Is there any type of log / diagnostics for figuring out why the heck it's broken?

Or should I just remove iTunes and reinstall and let it scan again?

He does have a few playlists which have taken hours to setup for their bar, and if i loose them i'll be screwed.

His iTunes Music folder is 55gb currently, with 7500 songs, but iTunes only sees 4400 songs totally 33gb. Which is quite puzzling.

WMA? They bought stuff or ripped it with WMP? I think WMP has a stupid default of turning on DRM even for your own music.

I have no idea what the guy ripped it with, it was another bar tenders music collection.

Is there anything windows based to scan for drm tracks? and maybe also strip out the drm security crap?

Not sure about scanning but if you can find a track that isn't in iTunes but you can still play in WMP then look in properties. It should say whether it has any protection on it or not.

way way too many songs to pick through to try that one. but if itunes ran the import, took 7 hours to convert tracks, added 15gb to the directory, it still doesn't explain why the music database only increased by 3gb.

Before the import, the database was at 30gb (around 4000 tracks), but the music folder was around 43 gb. After the import, the folder was 55gb, but itunes only saw 4400 tracks which are about 33gb.

if any of those songs were projected by drm, they shouldn't of even converted or been copied into the itunes folder to begin with, he was already missing songs which he had in his itunes music folder.

is there anyway to rebuild the database with having to worry about backing up everything and saving all the playlist data?

Ohhh okay. Not sure about that then.

ctrl+a + delete on all the songs, then re-adding them into the database seemed to have solved the issue, it's still processing album art, but now I have 6900 songs totaling about 52gb. (2 tracks were DRM protected)

BAH! it deleted all the playlist contents... time to re-clone this drive and start from scratch again