Using Itunes with Google Music Manager

I love Google Music, it allows me to copy my entire iTunes library to Google, and allows that music to be shared with anything my google account is logged into.

Now I have a huge collection, about 30k songs, and that collection resides on a portable hard drive, that way as I get new computers, I don't need to reload the entire hard drive.  This last time I got a new computer, I installed the music manager, and then got an error There are 10 or less songs in your itunes library.

After much research, and testing, I figured out what the issue was.  Google Music Manager is looking for a specific itunes location, and if your library doesn't match the location, it will now see it.



Looking at the registry its looking for it my profile %UserProfile%\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music Library.xml

So I first thought, well, lets just update the registry setting.  However this didn't work, every time I restarted music manager it would just change the registry value back.  So my next thought was to create a sim link.  To do this click on the windows button, type "cmd" right click on "Command and Prompt" and click on "Run as administrator"

First check to make sure that you don't Already have a iTunes folder in your "Music Folder" if your iTunes library is not stored in the My Music folder, delete this folder.    

Next type in the following command
mklink /d %USERPROFILE%\Music\iTunes <Itunes.xml location>

in my example, my itunes library xml file was located in the M:\Itunes folder, so I did

mklink /d %USERPROFILE%\Music\iTunes M:\Itunes

Now if check to make sure your library is named correctly, in for me I had named my library "Itunes Library.xml"  This did not work, google Music still couldn't see it, I needed to rename my library.  So I renamed the "iTunes Library.itl" to "iTunes Music Library.itl" and "itunes Library.xml" to "iTunes Music Library.xml".  After doing this, google music manager could not see my itunes library.