Have you gone in and told Itch where those files are? You need to go to the Files tab and drag your external drive to the "All" crate, then it will add them.

^this problem has nothing to do with itch... he said the FINDER can't find them... its the MAC OS FINDER.

but yeah... why would you ever look with the OS's finder during a gig... everything should be done within ITCH...

if all your files are added to the itch library, just use the search box at the top right, or CMD-F (MAC) or CTRL-F (PC)

You're correct, the problem is when I use the Finder to locate files.

I need to look for mp3 files through the Finder in order to add them to the ITCH crates/library.

By the way, I do have to -once in a while- look for songs during gigs that I have not put in crates simple because they're one of those random/most-likely-will-never-use-again tracks that wedding guests request. When ever I need to look for a certain song, MAC Finder is the easiest way to look for it. I'd prefer to use iTunes, but I can't drag songs from iTunes to ITCH. Can I ?

I'm really thinking it has something to do with the fact that my music is now on an external HDD....The same songs that I can finding by searching in Finder, I was able to locate them easily before when they were in my internal HDD. It happened again tonight with a couple of songs that I knew I had them in my external HDD, but then only way to locate them was by going folder by folder. But, it takes longer to find them that way.

just drag all of your music onto the all category... it will be in the library but not in a crate. until you add it to one. you can search through itch then and you will always have overviews built before a song is loaded if you analyze all of your files.

also as to itunes... you can use your itunes playlists as crates in itch.. just click the itunes option in the itch prefs. i dont use it so i dont know the finer details, but if you need help on that, search and if no results, post a discussion thread on it...

^ that's what I said!

Would a 160 GB of mp3s take a toll on ITCH library?

lobboclub,

It sounds like Spotlight (OS X's search and indexing system) may not be indexing the external drive. The easiest way to check/fix this is to download Spotless and run it when you have the external drive attached.

Here is a link to Spotless;
www.fixamacsoftware.com

Hope this helps..
p.

Yes, you nailed it.....That's exactly what I think it's happening...some sort of indexing issue.

I'll download it tonight and give it a try...

Quick question to you Peter-G : Does this program starts automatically once I plug my external HDD ?

Thanks for the reply.

The program will only start when you open it. It's like any other application on a mac. The program is to help show you what drives are being indexed, what index versions are on them and allowing you to enable/disable the indexing process as well.

You should only need to run the program once as it should show you what the state of play is for your Fat32 formated drive and allow you to enable indexing if it is not already enabled.

p.

i ran 5 hours without issue on friday with about 475GB of music in the itch library.

To both Peter-G & DJdaveZ,

Thanks for the info.

Hi Peter-G,

I've downloaded Spotless and ran it.

I got the two green check marks on my Firewire External HDD, which I assume means that the HDD is being indexed....Closed down the program and I went back to search for the track and still can't locate it through the Finder, however I was able to find it by manually going folder by folder.

Should I delete the "Index files" to force a new HDD index ?

lobboclub,

There is no harm in having Spotlight re-index the drive. It will take some time however so it'd be advised to leave your external drive connected until the indexing stops.

Out of curiosity, when you are searching with Spotlight what criteria are you using? Is it the file name or some meta data with in the file (ie. album name). With Spotlight you can specify to search for file names or file contents. Depending on what criteria you have selected it may not show results.

I've been search for a mp3 which file name is "Cher - Believe.mp3"
Finder never gets to it and the only way to find it is going through the folder itself.

Pretty much all my mp3s file names are saved in the same way.

What I actually type on the finder is "Cher Believe " or just either "Cher" or "Believe".

None of those combination throws back the desired result.

lobboclub,

This the point where I suggest you follow this up with Apple. I did some testing on my own system and external drives and had spotlight indexing work with Fat32 formatted drives.

These links to Apple's support site and forums may be of help;

Apple Support - www.apple.com
Apple Support Forums - discussions.apple.com

Best of luck!
p.

thanks