My music is gone

Question

My music is gone

I was cleaning a MacBook but couldn’t reformat because I didn’t want to lose installed software and certain files had to stay on there. I turned off iCloud but noticed my iTunes remained. I didn’t want to leave my songs on the laptop so I removed all the music from iTunes. Although I wasn’t on iCloud this removed the songs from all of my iTunes everywhere. Is there a way to recover my songs? That’s a lot of money down the tubes if I can’t. Why does Mac make it that hard to clean up a laptop? there a way to recover my music?

Posted on Aug 26, 2019 7:36 AM

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Answer 1

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turingtest2

Level 10

273,027 points

Aug 27, 2019 3:29 AM in response to realgingerella

It would have been iTunes > Preferences > General > iCloud Music Library > Off. Simply deleting the entire Tunes folder in Finder, independently of iTunes, would have been the best approach. You can contact iTunes - Official Apple Support in case by some miracle they cache deleted files for a period and can restore them for you, but I doubt it.

tt2

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

273,027 points

Aug 26, 2019 9:39 AM in response to realgingerella

What you should have done was disconnected from iCloud Music Library before removing the songs, or only removed the downloads and then deleted the library file. This is a setting in iTunes, separate from the system login to iCloud. Is there a backup you've forgotten about? Is the another computer with the downloaded collection of files? When you remove from iCloud Music Library tracks are removed from that library and all devices, but downloaded tracks in another library are marked as removed and can be added back if needed. Can you restore them with file recovery software? E.g. https://www.easeus.com/mac/mac-undelete-free/index.htm

tt2

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Answer 3

Aug 27, 2019 4:17 PM in response to realgingerella

Thank you so much for putting me on the right track. I was able to find out how to “Unhide” my past purchases. Apple keeps an all-time record of your purchases based on the Apple ID. From there I was able to figure out how to “Hide” and “Unhide.” Thanks again :)

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