I just did a search and found nothing on this all the way back to March.

Everything was going well on my PB G4 1.5 Ghz 1.5 RAM OS 10.3.9 iTunes 6.0.5 yesterday. The last thing I did with it was streaming audio thru Airport express to my stereo.

Today, I start up the PB without problem. I start up iTunes and I get a rhythmic sound from the HD as the computer freezes. I quit out of iTunes (in between spinning beach balls) and run repair permissions. I get to a portion of the repair where the same sound from the hard drive is heard (click click click click claaaaaak. Click click click click claaaaaak - as if it's trying to access something. There did not seem to be anything physically wrong with the sound of the drive). However, permissions were repaired.

Started up iTunes again, and got the hard drive sound again. Finally, I got a warning the the iTunes library was invalid and that a new one was being compiled and labeled as damaged. Literally, before my eyes, a new list of all my songs was made in iTunes. Everything seems to work (play the tunes without problem). I have my mp3s on a partition separate from OS partition.

In my home directory, there are now 4 iTunes libraries. One that is labeled iTunes Library (directly inside the music folder), and then inside a folder labeled as previous libraries - iTunes 4 music library, iTunes 4 music library (old) (both from my upgrade from iTunes 4->6?), iTunes 4 music library 2006-9-3.

What gives? Should I trash the previous libraries and chalk it up to a quirk of OSX? Should I be worried? I have not found any info on this elsewhere. Any thoughts and/or ideas appreciated. Music is backed up on an external FW drive

-Spiff

When this happened to me, I trashed the old version library files with no problem. As long as you have your music backed up, I would go ahead and trash the rest of the library files except for the latest rebuilt version. It usually is only the xml index that gets futsed up and the music files are OK.

Once you build the new index things should be good. You may lose your playlists if the library file can't be salvaged and a new one has to be built from scratch.

That being said, I do occasionally find a song that is missing.

I'm a bit concerned about the drive going "click, click, click, CLACK". In my experience that is the sound of a drive on the verge of crossing over to the other side. Make a backup ASAP just in case I'm right.

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at first it sounded like your hard drive was going bad, but then it sounded like perhaps there were some bad blocks and that is where portions of your itunes data were, the bad blocks have been reallocated and are no longer usable. This of course led iTUnes into recreating the library since it no longer had one to use.
[docs.info.apple.com]
or not.


Now about your Itunes folder and the bits and bytes inside of it, if you had done a Google search using these terms "previous itunes library", the top link would have led you to this page
[docs.info.apple.com]
which would have given you the desired information, trash them.

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The Taoist Zhuangzi said, "Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone".
The sociologist, and historian, Adam Ferguson described the phenomenon of spontaneous order in society as the "result of human action, but not the execution of any human design".

Thanks for the info, people. I did search the apple site, but alas, did not do a google search. Doh.

As for the drive, I suspect it probably is a bad sector or two. The click and clack sound was the drive trying to access itself, not necessarily a loud audible sharp click or clack. Sorry about the confusion.

My music is backed up. No problem. The playlists are still there! Woo Hoo! Again, thanks.

-Spiff