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[Grayde]

I recently had my hard disk crash. I have all of my music and videos on an external hard disk so they are safe. I now have a new computer and would like to recreate my library from my iPOD to the new iTunes WITHOUT without copying all of the music and videos to the new computer as the iPOD references the music files on the hard disk.

Does anyone have any idea if this can be done. I do not want to have to recreate the entire library but I am at a loss presently.

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

[JamieShanks]

This post is a bit old, so you might already have it sorted, but...

Do you have a copy of the iTunes itl and xml library files on the external hard disk (or wherever)?
Can you use the same drive letter and path to the root music folder as you had on the old computer? (so for example, "E:\music\itunes" and then all the music is inside that). 

If so, just plug in the external drive, set its drive letter to the same as it was on the old computer, then copy old, complete iTunes library files over the new empty ones (in Win XP these are at C:\Documents and Settings\[your user name]\My Documents\My Music).

iTunes should just start and not notice its been moved.  Hopefully

Its a bit harder if you can't use the same path and drive letter as on the old computer.

If the paths have changed, there's a trick that works to update them, but its a bit messy.  Basically, you open the iTunes Music Library.xml file with a text editor and use search and replace to update the paths, then you corrupt the itl file by opening it and deleting all the contents, then iTunes rebuilds the library database (which can take an hour or so, but puts it back how it was on the old computer).  This works because iTunes keeps the xml file as a running duplicate/backup of the actual database file (the itl one), so falls back to the xml if the itl is corrupted.  You'll need a programmer's editor like EditPad, not Windows Notepad, and you'll need to corrupt rather than simply delete the itl file. 

There are also programs to extract data from iPods. I haven't used these, but one may allow you to get playlists off the iPod and onto the computer.

If you want more info on this just post.