If you’ve ever used iTunes for any length of time, you have had the dreaded exclamation point error. It is ridiculous and it should have been fixed in iTunes 2.0. Seriously, do the people who write this software ever use it?
In your iTunes music library, you’ll see some songs that have “!” next to them. If you try to play them it will say, “the song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?” Then, you can navigate to the file to match it to the song in the library.
If you have ONE OR TWO !’s this is no big deal. A few clicks fixes it.
If you have HUNDREDS of exclamation points, it is impossible. Do you actually want me to click to do this HUNDREDS of TIMES Apple? And I should point out, it is easy to have hundreds of exclamation points if you move your iTunes library, or add a hard drive, or have something crash, or clone a machine, or change a samba drive.
Please don’t waste your time posting a work-around to fix this, and don’t direct me to the same thing in the Apple Discussion Forums. I appreciate your help, but those workarounds often screw the whole library up and often result in even more !’s.
Rather than just complain. I am going to provide Apple with the solution to mybiggestcomplaint about iTunes. You can save us from exclamation point hell, by giving us a search function where I can tell iTunes to search the following folder(s) and than match up the missing songs to the original file. Seriously Apple, you have the technology to make Spotlight and a simple boolean will match the file names up. Why not save us all from this hair pulling? It’s completely unnecessary.
It’s not just me, either. Look at the iTunes Discussion Forum or search google. This drives everybody crazy. I love my iPods and iTunes generally works fine, but you’re killing us with this.
Subscribe to macaddict
Same with other media players and Windows Movie Maker. Every time your move something, you have to relocate everything. It makes me mad!
Lawrence on August 27th, 2007 at 10:31 pm | Link
Advice.
Don’t move you’re iTunes library, or it’ll **** up.
If you do, just delete the iTunes Library file with iTunes shut and open iTunes again. And add the hole iTunes folder to your library.
Easy enough.
Joe O'Reilly on August 28th, 2007 at 11:40 am | Link
WOW. I just found something no one else has, to solve this DAMN “!” issue.
My network share would drop, and itunes would reck my iphone playlist with exclamation points. Try this:
Highlight the playlist. then go to FILE -> Export. Just save it as a TXT file.
Presto, all ! are gone.
Dan
Dan on November 11th, 2007 at 10:46 am | Link
Dan! You are the MAN! Now, if I can just get my iPod to sync without the stupid !!! coming back. I’ll keep you posted! Thanks
Jennifer on January 2nd, 2008 at 12:46 am | Link
I just tried that and it didnt’ work for me.
Tone on January 3rd, 2008 at 3:56 pm | Link
I’ve had this issue and may have a solution if you are using an Apple computer, provided that your songs are still in your iTunes library.
In my case, I am using an external hard drive to store my iTunes library. Even though my songs are exactly where they should be, (for example, G:iTunes:Beatles:Abbey Road:Come Together), iTunes gives me the exclamation point because it can’t find some songs. I had my iTunes music folder directory set as G[external hard drive]:iTunes in iTunes…Preferences…Advanced…General. , but iTunes still couldn’t find the songs. It was like it wasn’t even looking in the directory I was telling it to look in. Very frustrating.
If you are using iTunes on an Apple computer, hold down the Option key while launching iTunes. iTunes should then ask you to point it to your iTunes library. Choose the directory where the library is located and I think that iTunes should find all the songs that had exclamation points, provided that they were still in the library. You would think that this is what the iTunes…Preferences…Advanced…General…iTunes music library location setting should do every time it opens, but apparently not.
I hope this helps at least one person.
Jim on January 6th, 2008 at 6:01 pm | Link
Thanks Jim, that worked like a charm on my Windows box!
Windows users, just hold the Shift key while launching iTunes to bring up the library selection dialog.
John on January 13th, 2008 at 8:15 am | Link
problem is, is that i moved folders around inside the main itunes folder (trying to reorganize for example putting the wav files and mp3 files of an artist in one folder instead of two separate folders or by deleting duplicates since I had two external hard drives each containg some of the same files) so I feel like I dont know what to do now…
jonathan on January 14th, 2008 at 7:33 am | Link
Jim, you’re a feakin’ genius, no more annoying exclamation marks, I can stop grinding my teeth at night.
pa-ula on January 22nd, 2008 at 1:51 pm | Link
I am having the same issue but mine might be a little unique, so not sure if that is why the above dont seem to be working.
I have 7000+ songs in my library. Every single one of them is listed twice. One works, the other doesnt (and has an exclamation point). I am not sure exactly WHY this happened, but it did, and I know when it did. I bought my wife a laptop, and she installed iTunes and it started “finding” all the music (across our network share). Strangely, her installation of iTunes even found all of the playlists that I had created on the primary computer.
But I digress. She doesnt need iTunes on her laptop, so that part is an easy fix - we’ll remove it and use a different program for her to listen to the music across the network share.
iTunes wont let me sort by the ! field, so I am at a loss as to what to do in order to remove these 7000+ !’s. I feel like I dont need to “relink” them to the original files - the other entries are there and work fine.
Ideas?
Thanks!
Jeff on January 26th, 2008 at 12:47 pm | Link
Eureka!
As soon as I cliked “Post Comment” I switched back over to iTunes, frustrated that I could not sort by the ! field.
So I took a look at what other fields I could display, and added “Date added”. I sorted by that, and sure enough, I was able to scroll to the date/time that my wife’s iTunes had started to discover all these songs, and there they were 7273 exclamation points, all in a row. From there it was easy to delete them.
I still dont understand what/why these 2 installations of iTunes did what they did, but ohh well, its working now!
Thanks!
Jeff on January 26th, 2008 at 12:51 pm | Link
awesome, we can bitch here and find solutions for our problems, i’m bookmarking this place.
Andrew on February 28th, 2008 at 10:28 am | Link
How do I sort on them…. I just want to know if I have them!!!! (Have just reorganized my whole Itunes) hehehe
Heidy on March 5th, 2008 at 1:14 pm | Link
Heidy -
Thats the thing - you cannot sort them. Next time you sync to your iPod, iTunes should tell you “could not sync the following 100 files” or something like that, and then all the !’s will appear (if they were not there already). My issue was more that every single song was listed twice, with one of them being invalid, so for me sorting by “Date Added” worked very well.
But other times, you might reorganize some music, and create the same problem. Say you had a folder called “Blues”, and you decided to move all those songs by BB King, Albert King, etc., into your “My Music” folder. You have iTunes re-add them to your library, but now all those old songs are !’s. I think in that kind of case you would have to just sift through and delete them.
I am sure there are better ways to manage these kinds of moves from within iTunes, and maybe someone else can elaborate on that - I despise iTunes for its many weaknesses and flaws - I only use it for syncing, and tend to use other apps/tools for anything else I want to do.
Jeff on March 5th, 2008 at 1:30 pm | Link
I HATE WHEN THIS HAPPENS! exclamation points are appearing next to totally random songs in my library, and i have no idea why and/ or how to get rid of them! i’ve tried all the things people said on this forum but nothing’s working, anyone have any ideas?
stef on March 11th, 2008 at 6:31 pm | Link
I have all of my songs on my external hd and a few days ago my itunes stopped recognizing the location.
all of my many songs have the ever-frustrating “!”.
i have changed the location of my library in preferences and changed it back with no success. i can find individual songs successfully but cannot solve en masse.
i have tried all of the methods listed here. the ‘preferences>advanced’ way didnt change anything, it was still showing the correct location.
the ‘open itunes>hold option’ didnt work as it said my external hd itunes folder was not recognizable as having an itunes library (or something along those lines).
i have mac os x but have not updated my itunes lately (my safari freezes my g5 -yet another fun one to tackle).
please, if anybody can help i will be forever grateful as my life has been virtually silent and frustrating.
James on March 26th, 2008 at 12:24 pm | Link
I am using a PowerBook 17″ with an external Apple keyboard. When trying to hold the “option” key to get itunes to ask for the library, I didn’t get anything. I then unplugged the keyboard and it worked with the internal keyboard.
I’m really glad I found this post, those stupid exclamations were driving me !!!!!!! crazy. You’re going on my RSS feed.
hope this helps someone.
bert boan on April 2nd, 2008 at 10:31 am | Link
Oh, I also unplugged my iPod to make sure it wasn’t pulling bad info from there. Don’t know which worked but I no longer have the issue.
bert boan on April 2nd, 2008 at 10:33 am | Link
I found a solution that worked for me where all the others failed. The downside is it takes a lot of disk space.
1) Figure out where iTunes thinks your missing files are. you can do this by looking at the iTunes Music Library.xml file and find a song that has the ! next to it. Note the path.
2) Copy your iTunes Music to the path it expects.
3) Start iTunes and go to Advanced | Consolidate Library. This will copy music from the copy of the library to the real library.
4) Repeat for every additional path it expects to find music.
If you don’t have enough disk space for an entire copy of iTunes Music, try parts of your library instead.
Alan K on April 4th, 2008 at 6:15 pm | Link
I held down shift on my PC and selected the .itl in the hopes of getting rid of my exclamation points, but now I’ve managed to revert iTunes back to an OLD library. I’m missing playlists and many albums. I can’t figure out how to get it back to the way it was.
Please help!
katie on April 15th, 2008 at 9:58 pm | Link
I have the same problem regarding my external hard drive. It doesn’t recognise the link anymore. I tried to hold shift on my laptop and it ask me if I can locate my library or create a new one. When I click on locate library and point it to my G external hard drive, I cannot click ok as it ask me more where to look, even if I open a specific song. How can I locate library to my whole Itune file in my external hard drive?
Dominique on May 12th, 2008 at 11:47 pm | Link
OMG! I was up all last night frustrated about these stupid exclamation points. When I close out of Itunes and reopen it all the songs do not have exclamation points next to my songs, UNTIL I connect my IPOD with my USB. Then it shows the exclamation point next to all my songs. At one point all these songs were synced, until I decided to add one more song to my IPOD, now it deleted all these songs that WERE on my IPOD. Now I can’t get them back on there. I am so frustrated…can someone please help me….
Jennifer Novak on May 21st, 2008 at 4:34 am | Link
hey is there a way, after deleting your entire library accidentally, to recover the info from your iPod or am I out of luck.
I ask this only because my whole cd case (over 200) cds were stolen and they aren’t on my iPod or computer anymore because my computer synced after I had to reboot my computer because there was a virus in the registry. Bad Huh? Trust me I know
SO PLEASE IF YOU CAN, HELPPPPPPPPPP!
Ashley on May 21st, 2008 at 1:53 pm | Link
if you’re using Mac OS, THE MOST AMAZING SCRIPT EVER WRITTEN:
search GOOGLE for: super remove dead tracks
click on the first link - DougsAppleScripts for iTunes
Follow the instructions. Wizardry. FREE….Then give the guy 5 bucks. You’ll want to give him more than that, I promise.
al on May 25th, 2008 at 8:46 pm | Link
Jim!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
brilliant. All you have to do is hold down ctrl and alt when opening itunes. Problem solved! i dont even know how that works, but it did
Jelani on June 18th, 2008 at 3:25 pm | Link
my husband and I are both having the same troubles listed by everyone here (!!!! from hell) PLUS….our itunes library is CLONING itself. It looks like this:
itunes are playing of external HD just fine for days. Then suddenly the stupid !!! start showing up. I check my advanced preferences and nothing has changed, it still points to the HD. BUT….songs are missing, so I look inside the folder called “itunes music” and there is a folder called “itunes” and the music is in there. All of it. But I did not create that folder, and the same thing has happened on my husband’s laptop, and he is pointing the music source to his completely separate HD. So the same problem is occuring on both computers. So it’s not the computer, it’s not the HD, it’s the program. so has anyone else had the itunes music folder clone itself?
monica on July 6th, 2008 at 5:59 am | Link
To get rid of exclamation points for files that no longer exist, I selected every song in the library (CTRL + A) and selected Get Info > Change Info for All Selected Files.
In the Info window, I changed the BPM to 1 (can be anything). After a few minutes, all files that were available had a BPM of 1, but the files that iTunes can’t find did not.
If you then sort your library by BPM, all the exclamation mark files will be at the top of the list, ready to be deleted.
Tom Lawton on July 27th, 2008 at 7:52 pm | Link
I shared everyone’s frustrations about the exlamation points and just now solved the problem. I “consolidated” the library under the “advanced” tab. Apparently this allowed the I-Tunes gremlins to figure out that some of my music was on my external hard-drive. When I unplugged the external harddrive it couldn’t find those songs. I find I-tune “hel” totally useless. I hope this works for some of you. I’ve spent hours and hours on this problem! Good luck.
Glenda on August 1st, 2008 at 7:18 pm | Link
Sorting by Add date was the fix I needed, I doubled my folder by dragging in from my external hard drive.
Just got to say thanks for the suggestion… BRILLIANT!!
Matt on August 4th, 2008 at 10:40 pm | Link
Man I’m glad there’s a workaround for this (holding down the option key while iTunes starts). Every once in a while my network drive with my music disconnects and iTunes goes into exclamation point hell.
Joe on August 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm | Link
SOLUTION
I struggled with this problem several times after moving my library (140GB) from an external to an internal and all that over the years.
A number of solutions have been proposed on various messages boards that you get when you google this problem - I have tried them all and none worked for my specific problem with the exclamation points.
I just completely fixed my problem - this might not work for everyone.
in Music/iTunes/ if you have been using iTunes for any length of time there will be a folder called Previous iTunes Libraries - DELETE this and restart iTunes - as long as you have (in iTunes prefs) the correct path listed for your actual iTunes music file library this should clear up the problem.
The problem (I think) is caused because of all the old backups of libraries when the files would all have been in different locations (on an external for example - or when you have more albums from the same artist or whatever)
hope this helps
Dave Steele on August 10th, 2008 at 10:09 am | Link
I’ve been struggling with this for months - I manage my music in seperate genre folders and drag/drop them into iTunes every once in a while after I’ve updated the tags - resulting in multiple duplicate records in iTunes..
The “creation Date” method seems to work best for me, having just deleted over 2,000 entries in mere moments. I still had a few duplictes to clean up by hand, so am looking for another method.
The BPM method could work, however, I’m in the process of populating that field. I’m looking at the other available fields.
Sure wish I could find a good dupe finder / comparison tool for MP3s. Godfather seems teh best so far.
Good luck, all!
Earl G on August 13th, 2008 at 6:29 pm | Link
Heres a solution that works through the ‘rating’ field. İf you rate your files (I don’t) you will have to improvise with other fields. 1- Go to library - Music 2 - Select all 3- Get info 4 - Rate 1 star ( At this point the files with the broken links will not we rated. 5 - Sort on ‘Rating’. The files with the ! are all together now. 6 - Delete all unrated files. As a caution select ‘keep files on disk’ if your not sure what you are deleting.
Kutlu Kanberoğlu on August 24th, 2008 at 9:23 am | Link
Thanks Tom L, well done. - BPM fix
SANDIP on August 25th, 2008 at 11:27 pm | Link
JIM IS A GOD! thank you. hold option(mac) shift(windows), point to your library file, voila.
timmy on September 1st, 2008 at 5:10 pm | Link
Problem #1
a friend recently gave me an external hard drive of over 6,000 songs. Not knowing that itunes automatically downloads them, I copied them all to my itunes folder - now having at least 2 of each. ALL have !!!! So, I can’t listen to them unless I have the drive connected.
Problem #2
My previous library has somehow been converted to a Safari file. I can’t access any of that music at all.
I’m using Windows XP.
Would be BEYOND relieved if someone can help! Thanks!
Samantha on September 4th, 2008 at 8:43 pm | Link
I play my music via a PSP. I am on a PC and I just changed the source of my itunes folder in Prefs–>Advanced and it worked.
Justin on September 5th, 2008 at 7:11 am | Link