iTunes Question: Changing Drive Letter of Library

[Tabe]

OK, here's the deal: I use iTunes on my Windows PC at work for playing mp3 files.  I've been doing this since iTunes was first released and it works great.  The music files are on an external hard drive that used to be connected to my laptop.  Thanks to some changes in corporate policy, I'm losing that laptop and the external is now connected to my desktop.  Another change is that I have an enforced logon script that maps a network drive (one I absolutely need to use and whose letter I cannot change) to the same letter that the external drive was on my laptop.  This means that iTunes no longer sees my music files.  I've copied over the library files but they point to the wrong file locations (obviously).

 

How can I update the file locations in iTunes without:

 

A) Having to do every file individually

B) Losing all my playlists and play count information

C) Losing the network drive I need to have

 

 

I should mention that I have always maintained the iTunes library myself (I have turned off all the "let iTunes manage my collection" stuff). 

 

So is there a way I can just tell iTunes, in bulk, "Hey, look here, not there for files"?

[Tabe]

Used a solution I found on the web but it ended up only being a 75% solution:

 

- edit the itunes .itl file to be corrupt (i.e. delete everything in it and save it)

- edit the .xml file to change all the file paths to the correct ones

- launch iTunes

- iTunes then rebuilds the library from the XML file

 

For whatever reason, when I did this, iTunes only recovered the info on about 12000 of my 16000 songs.  That's annoying but it's better than recovering nothing.

[muhammedboehm]

Is itunes on the drive or your desktop? Couldnt you take it the external home back up the files, reformat the drive to a diffrent letter and reload the files?

[Tabe]

The problem wasn't getting the content into iTunes.  That would be easy - just tell iTunes to look at the drive and add the music.  The problem was I already had a library full of songs, playlists and ratings.  And there's no easy way to tell iTunes, when you manage your library yourself, to look somewhere else for your music.