so yesterday itunes fucked up on me. i was trying to add some albums. it was fine when i was adding one album at a time but then i tried to add more than one and that's when it freaked out on me. perhaps the library is too large now (over 60 days of songs and podcasts) or maybe a file i was trying to add was corrupted. i got that spinning beach ball forever. i tried deleting some new files from the library in case they were the cause but alas it did not get rid of the beach ball. i restarted. i deleted the preferences. i did every mac trick i could think of. finally, i had to give in. i had to destroy it and rebuild it again. man, i just did that a couple months ago! i haven't even listened to the whole library since then. at least this will give me a chance to go through the library and take out shit i don't really listen to or like (again!). i've decided i'm not keeping songs that the ex- liked and i didn't like. i already made her a copy of the library so i don't have to worry about deleting her precious crap music.

anyway, so how i saved the library and the playlists but not the playcounts was this... i deleted the library. that was painful but it was a must. then i changed my settings so that itunes would store the files in the external drive because the default is store them in the computer. (this could be a major source of my problems and i know it is as i have an older mac that can't handle such things well.) next i did file/add to library and chose the old library. i was afraid i would create a duplicate library or somehow erase my old library by doing this method. at first i tried to copy my library on the external drive to avoid such a catastrophe but that didn't go so well and would've taken too long for my impatience. so i just did the file/add to library straight from the old library. it didn't duplicate and didn't erase the old library. all it did was basically sense that this is what the library should be. i can't word it well. it basically went ah-ha! but it took just as long to do this. it was not instantaneous. finally, i did file/library/import playlist and chose the old xml database file. i had to first put that file on my desktop so itunes could create a new one in the proper place. but doing that, it was able to re-create all my playlists. since all the songs were still there, there was no issue. i looked at the song count in each playlist as compared to my ipod and everything was fine. the only oddity was that some songs lost their file info. it was about 3 or 4 albums and those were all live bootlegs of the same artist so i can't figure out which file was which show. luckily, the ex- has this so i deleted it and will get it from her instead of trying to figure out which song is from which show. also, there were 3 other songs that had lost their file info as well as the song itself. you can click on it but it won't play. i looked in computer for the original files and added them back with no issue. strange but that's how i spent the past 2 days and now i'm refining my playlists even more.

i read about how having lots and large playlists as well as large artwork creates large libraries which become troublesome but fuck it! i'll keep it down as much as i can but i'm not slicing anything just for the sake of putting my library on a diet. maybe if i'm really good at saving money and luck holds with me, i will be able to get a new mac in a year or two. my mac doesn't feel old to me but it is now. so slow that it's painful at times. i don't even open iphoto anymore because it's just such a damn pain in the ass. this means i haven't been taking photos either. it makes me a bit sad and void but i'll get back into photography and daring to open iphoto. who knows, maybe i'll clean up that library by deleting photos of the ex-. :p