I don't know if you've tried using the old library file - every time itunes is upgraded it saves the old library file in a separate folder. Maybe the new file got corrupted somehow? Although if you upgraded
after you lost your playlists this might not work. The itunes playlists are saved in the library file, unless you exported them or recently made a CD backup of your itunes library. You can try this if you haven't already:
1. Close itunes and go into the itunes folder (usually my music>itunes) and look for the 'itunes library.itl' file. Move this onto your desktop. Leave the 'itunes music library.xml' file where it is.
2. Also in the itunes folder you should see a 'previous itunes libraries' folder - open this. You might only see one file; if you see more than one use the file from the date you noticed the problem.
Copy this file into the itunes folder to replace the one you just moved, then change the name to just 'itunes library' or 'itunes library.itl'.
3. Try opening itunes now - you should see everything the way it was at the time of upgrading, but if itunes only saves the most recent library you may have lost the playlists ....:(
If there is another way to restore playlists I haven't found it yet - I lost my playlists about a month ago because I didn't know how the library file worked, and I was going between 7.4.3 and 7.3.2 and I must have overwritten the old library file. After that I found on the apple website how to do it correctly.
If that didn't work and you have a disc backup of your itunes you can try opening the contents of the discs in windows so you can see what files are on there, and look for a copy of your old library file and copy that into the itunes folder in step #2 instead. But don't restore from the backup discs in itunes if your music is still showing up - when I tried that I got duplicates of whatever music files were on the discs.
There is also a program called
copytrans that you can use to copy the music and supposedly your playlists off your ipod back onto your computer, but I didn't have any luck with that; again I just got duplicates of my song files and not the playlists themselves. And the free version only does 100 songs at a time.
If I've learned anything from this experience, it's to save a copy of the library file
before doing any updates because it's a lot easier than all this copying stuff - you just go under File>Export Library and save the file somewhere. Then if you have any problems you can just import that file and all your playlists will be restored.
