Accidently deleted iTunes Playlist

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Level 1

5 points

Accidently deleted iTunes Playlist

Hey!
I was putting all my music into playlists (which took me HOURS) and when I was deleting duplicates I accidently deleted one of the playlists instead. Is there any way to get it back? I have a back up of my system from earlier that day through Time Machine but I'm not sure how I can get that playlist back from there. I can't find a "Playlists" file in the iTunes Folder. Thanks for the help!

Macbook 13.3' 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Dec 21, 2007 5:41 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Richard Tench

Level 2

145 points

Jan 11, 2008 4:00 PM in response to melvel

This happened to my wife today. Luckily we have Time Machine and could restore the iTunes Library from a couple hours back and didn't lose much.

I'm surprised that this problem has been there for so long. If you have a Playlist selected and press Delete, there is no "Are you sure?" dialog and there is no Undo. 😟

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Answer 2

Jan 11, 2008 8:33 PM in response to melvel

I believe the file you want to look for in Time Machine is iTunes Music Library.xml.

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Answer 3

Jan 11, 2008 8:40 PM in response to Diane Wordsmith

We accidentally restored the entire iTunes folder. It didn't take too long as our music is stored elsewhere.

So we could have just restored the XML file then imported the playlist?

I found out how to get the warnings back for playlist deletion in the following post.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6053486&#6053486

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Answer 4

PT

Level 7

20,888 points

Jan 11, 2008 8:55 PM in response to Diane Wordsmith

Diane Wordsmith wrote:
I believe the file you want to look for in Time Machine is iTunes Music Library.xml.

No the other one. On a Mac called "iTunes Library" with no extension but if you do a Get Info on that file you will see it is a database file. That is the file that holds everything about your iTunes library including playlists.
The .XML file is sort of the same thing but doesn't contain as much info and I think one key difference is the XML file doesn't have playlists. The XML file is generated by iTunes as an output file to be used by other applications.
Patrick

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