I just deleted my entire music library.. please help!

The recycle bin is different than your itunes library.


Is the music back out of the recycle bin? Have you closed and restarted itunes since you did that?

I'm not sure exactly what you did.

Do you remember what you clicked on, and so forth?


I guess, try opening itunes, if nothing plays or things look wrong, post back.

+Can I do computer restore to about an hour ago?+
I dunno. Did you set a restore point? Probably not.


+I went to edit>select all>delete>send to recycling bin+
So what happens if you go the Recycle Bin, select everything, right-click and Restore?

Are your songs on an ipod? if so it might be easier to pull them off of there.

------- would itunes delete my HARD DRIVE instead of its library? ----------

you said it just deleted the itunes library of songs? not all of your hard drive?

you also said that you took the songs out of the trash, where are they now?

if you know where they are, open iTunes, hold the option key down, just as it is opening, you can choose to create a new library there..do it, name it itunes2 if you wish.. so as an experiment, (take a song from where you have one, and put it on the desktop instead) then simply drag that song that you recovered to this new library (itunes, and let go).... see how that works.

if you want to go back to the old library, hold down the option key as you start up itunes, and choose it. (it hasn't gone away)...

report back, you have to let us know exactly what shape you are in (where the songs are now) if anywhere, what is the state of your harddrive? that doesn't sound right what you said, you wouldn't even be able to post if you wiped out your harddrive... be specific about what is working and what is not working, where things are that you know where they are...

----- where things are that you know where they are... ---------

oh, i thought i was in a different forum and just saw that you are on windows, so you'll have to interpret what i said and translate to windows terms and extra steps...

Jon.

Hello PsychedelicWond,
The answer from JonK is 100% correct.
Where are the restored songs now?
You have Windows Vista so please search the files with clicking on the START button and enter the name of one deleted song.
Or go to Documents/Music/iTunes and check if the files are there.
iTunes for Windows cannot delete files completely.
If you have found the files please follow JonK steps.
Good Luck!!
Peter

iTunes is not capable of "deleting" files from your hard drive. Unless you can rewrite the actual program code to force it to 'permanently delete', it sends everything to the recycle bin but only if you tell it to.

When you select a song file (or files) and click Edit, then click Clear, (or hit Backspace) you should be prompted to either Remove files, or keep files in your library (this is just the library where iTunes recognizes the files-they haven't been moved at this point).

Then you are prompted to either move the removed files to the recycle bin or keep them on your HD. There is no option to permanently delete them. This is a 'safeguard' against exactly what you say it did. Again you have to go in and change program code to make it do this differently.

Unless you emptied your recycle bin, the files are still on your hard drive. You only need to locate then and re-add them to your iTunes library, and all of the changes you made should be intact since you changed the tags and those are now stored with that info as part of the data file.

Believe me, I know your frustration. Imagine erasing a 500Gb music drive with 93000 songs and audio books on it. I mean actually 'erasing' the drive. With about 2500 files that hadn't been backed up to DVD yet.

Unless you deleted the files, they aren't gone. You just need to find them.

Message was edited by: MaclessInAZ

Message was edited by: MaclessInAZ

I am having a similar problem. I need to pull my songs off my iPod nano, 3rd generation, and get them back onto my computer into the iTunes file. How do you do this? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.