Don't even get me started on iTunes inept file tracking and scanning "abilities."

iTunes is decent and does quite a bit very well, but there are subtle problems that can become major issues for some people. I've been bitted quite a few times with it not knowing where some files were located. There was no way to fix other than to manually point it to the correct location for each track, one at a time.

There was also no way to get it to do a complete scan to tell me which tracks had this problem. Only by clicking on a track would it scan and then display the exclamation point. With 20k tracks this means I had anywhere from 1 to a nightmare-level of tracks it no longer knew the location for. My only choice was to toss the whole DB and just drag all the files over to iTunes again.

This has happened multiple times and each time there was no change to the drive the songs were on. This may be exacerbated by not keeping tracks on the local HD. It's happened on an external drive as well as a network share (whose mount point looks just like any other drive to most applications).

I used to also keep the iTunes database (yes, I know that's a misnomer) on the external/network drive with the music so that I could access it from any Mac by pointing iTunes on that machine to it. This worked very well for a long time with the music connected to another Mac on the network. Connected to a Windows machine not so much. The datafiles are also not compatible with the Windows version of iTunes, including the hard-paths it records for the music.

I've resorted to just keeping the iTunes DB local to the machine that's to run iTunes and the music where it's always been. Let's see if that improves anything. The issue with this setup is that when new music is added to the music drive every iTunes installation that access it will have to re-add the entire drive and discover which songs are new and which it already knows about.

Interested in any tips if anyone has better ideas. It takes a long (long) time to populate iTunes with all my tracks the first time around. I'm about to do it tonight before going to bed for the new iTunes 8. I just wiped the DB last night.