losing Playlists with Catalina?

My experience has been similar. I have a large music library - over 375,000 songs, and I have them kept on a RAID volume rather than copied into my library. I am a DJ and I import new music Monthly, usually on the order of thousands of songs at a time. Occasionally, I have to move folders around. iTunes and the Music app have no means of allowing me to move the physical file location from within the application, so this sometimes forces me to delete a bunch of stuff from the library and re-add it (usually tens of thousands of songs at a time). This has been quite a test against iTunes - which struggled to manage it. I understand that's not a common use case, and I chalked the performance issues up to old hardware.

When I upgraded hardware, I was appalled to find that the Music application in Catalina, keeps losing a large number of my files. I import songs, everything works until I close the Music app, and then most of them are gone the next time I open the application. I've tried this on multiple machines, on an iTunes->Music upgrade and also on a clean install. The application does not appear to be able to manage large libraries properly. I searched these discussion boards, and found that many people have had the same experience - most of them just gave up.

Things I've observed:

* Opening the application while holding option, browsing to the original ITL file is slightly better. But the application still loses songs and playlists when I exit.

* Library.musicdb doesn't change immediately when I add music. The application appears to keep a working copy in memory somewhere, and another process or agent actually commits the changes to the database. This is where everything goes wrong.

* If you add a LOT of songs at once, it will stop updating the Library.musicdb, and any changes you make after that point will disappear the next time you open Music.

* When this abandonment of committing the library occurs, the console is usually filled with log messages about "track not created because it is not new and does not exist"

* Importing from the iTunes XML (rather than opening the ITL) or importing an XML with over 150,000 tracks in it, will make the symptoms appear almost immediately

I've been able to kind of skirt around the problem by doing the following. You lose your import dates and play stats, but it prevents the Music app from losing stuff when you close it:

* Open Music, and spend a long time putting everything into it again.

* Create a new playlist that contains all your songs (or split them up into multiple playlists if you want - I did mine by Genre) -- just ensure you all of your songs are in one or more playlists

* Export the library to a new XML file

* Export each of your smart playlists to separate XML files

* Close and re-open Music. Observe that all your hard work is gone again.

* Close Music. Open music while holding the Option key.

* Choose a location for your new library.

* Use the pieterderycke/itunes-export tool on GitHub will turn your iTunes XML into m3u playlists.

* Open each m3u in a text editor like TextMate or Atom, and ensure the path to the files is correct. I had to do a search/replace, because the paths the tool output started with '../'.

* Break any playlist that's bigger than 3MB into multiple smaller files. You can do it in a text editor, but I'm old school andI used terminal:

$ cat BigList.m3u | wc -l

$ cat BigList.m3u | head -n25000 > BigList_1.m3u

$ cat BigList.m3u | head -n50000 | tail -n +25001 > BigList_2.m3u

$ cat BigList.m3u | head -n75000 | tail -n +50001 > BigList_3.m3u

$ cat BigList.m3u | head -n100000 | tail -n +75001 > BigList_4.m3u

* Import each m3u file, one at a time. Wait for music to finish processing each file, and doing gapless playback analysis.

* Watch the Library.musicdb to ensure that it grows after each playlist you import. This took several minutes, sometimes, after I imported an m3u. If you import an m3u and the library stops growing, the playlist is too large - stop importing, close Music, split that m3u into smaller chunks, and reopen Music before trying again.

* Import your smart playlists from the XMLs. If any are dependent on other playlists, you will likely need to update them.

* Backup your Library.musicdb file

* Most importantly -- write an angry letter to Apple about this. Many people have libraries unsuitable for storage in the cloud. They give us literally one way to sync music to our phones and then make the application so brittle that it crumbles under even the slightest amount of load. We can't be quiet about it.

Hope this helps someone.

Hello Stibae_12,

As long as the information is organized in the traditional iTunes file system (versus manually organized), there shouldn't be a problem with the migration. You may want to save a copy of your playlists by highlighting them on the left then going to iTunes in the upper left corner (Next to the Apple Icon) and selecting Library > Export Playlist.

If you are subscribed to Apple Music, then there's nothing that you need to do.

The new Music app in Catalina still supports a sidebar with playlists, playlist folders, and so on. See Empty/corrupt iTunes/Music library after upgrade/crash - Apple Community if your library didn't make the transition.

tt2

Let me tell you my story. I have 20 odd years of music, all nicely catalogued as my music grew, my tastes expanded and so did my library. I am a DJ, huge music lover and listen to a dozen types of genres all relating to jazz, funk, hip hop, house, techno and so on. They are categorised into each type of genre and three into their subfolders, artists, labels, compilations, and per month of each year new music. For those that go into each sub folder, a selected ones go into another folder prepared for my DJing, basically my favourite tracks. These are by year and then month.

Multiply this into each genre and you can imagine the complexity of my so called system of categorising.

When I updated to Catalina, 40% of my genres folders either went blank, and inside these I can see the 4 thumbnails on the left side, but no music and no name. Even sub folders the same.

What I tried to do next was based on each of those four thumbnails gave me the hint of what that folder music should represent. So I searched for this in the app, and wanted to select the search results and then drag them into the current playlist I am fixing. However, to make things worse, in the Music app, you CANNOT highlight all the tracks that result in the search. You have to go into Songs to be able to do this. What is worse is that Music app only lets you copy one album, ep etc at a time and cannot highlight multiple releases to copy in one go like you could in iTunes.

I realise this takes too long, so I calculated how much time it will take to fix the 40% and is too long.

Lucky for me:

• I clones my iTunes library which was on my external drive as it is now 4TB of music. I have a duplicate one which I have always backed up regularly when I had been using iTunes. So I am lucky.
• I have a time machine back up for Mojave of my computer before I updated to Catalina.

With these two back ups, I can now 1. Restore back to Mojave 2. Wipe the existing external library which has been corrupted by Catalina. 3. Copy my second back up to the now empty external drive that had the corrupted library.

When I wake up tomorrow and look at my computer it will be back at Mojave, with my most current iTunes library free from anything related to Catalina corruption.

OK. So should I upgrade to Catalina with another tactic? I have a way but is going to take me a long time, but it will be there most safe proof!!!

This is how: by copying the songs of each playlist out onto a folder on my hard drive. With the same structure as I explained above. Genre > Artists / Labels / Compilations so forth. Once I have all these copied, I will guarantee if any conversion to Music App in Catalina corrupts, I have a master content on this new drive. I can then create these playlists again, and copy the content back into these newly created playlists, basically creating those that are missing, the 40% that had occurred in my previous bad update to Catalina.

This way I don’t have to rely on searching the existing library in Music app and try and create playlist of multiple releases. Instead I will just copy the content in from my new drive.

Lastly, even when I finish creating a new drive with all my music into folders, I still won’t update to Catalina yet until i am forced to when Apple decides to cut Mojave users out or if I need to update to new system as the apps I use like Adobe etc won’t support Mojave anymore.

Hope this helps, and I will update everyone if this method is the best way and full proof.

I am very disappointed with Apple taking many functionalities that were good user experience and killing them off in Music app. The no.1 thing they took out which hurts me the most would be having no album art in list view. Having lost view I can edit the data but at the same time see the album cover when I listen and easy to refer to. It’s only this view for the last 20 years and I just can’t accept Apple to take this out. I regret so much in updating to Catalina, pressured in feeling left behind but upon updating felt no difference compared to Mojave. Also Music App was super sluggish. I am not sure if clean install would have been better but is just too much work to install everything again from scratch.

Good luck all and I have attached how my playlist looked like after updating from iTunes to Music app. :(

See Empty/corrupt iTunes/Music library after upgrade/crash - Apple Community.

tt2

You can backup individual playlists with File > Library > Export Playlist or all playlists with File > Library > Export Library. Importing those lists into a new library only works if the files referenced by the lists are at the given paths.

tt2

I'm currently struggling with my playlists.

I had to revert to Mojave to get my library back in order.

Music (the app) turns standard playlist folders into smart playlists, this has created a mess for me. The only solution I have found so far has been to create new playlist folders and manually update them with the playlists, one playlist at a time, since it doesn't seem possible to grab a bunch of playlists and drag them to a playlist folder.

Also, it's not possible to drag playlists into a Smart (!) Playlist, previously standard Playlist folder in Mojave.

I've been using Macs all my life and I'm starting to look at other options now that Apple is turning into a phone shop and keeps releasing apps that assume we're dumb by attempting to guess how we plan to use them.

The same overall advice applies to Music too. You may be able to restore a backup of the Music.musiclibrary database from Time Machine, or reconvert your pre-Music iTunes Library.itl database, either to use as is or so that you can export playlists from it which you can then reimport into the current library. Finally there is also advice on recovering media and/or playlists from any device you might have, which again are not really platform dependent.

tt2

I've just downloaded Catalina and I can confirm that ALL my playlists are missing. They were added to a playlist folder which was part of the old iTunes set up. Now when you click on iTunes menu bar there is no option for Playlists. Typical Apple arrogance. They're so convinced that their system is better than anyone else's that they never admit there's a problem and try to con us into thinking we want an option which was never there. Pure hubris

When I upgraded I started to see even bigger problems with playlists that began with Mojave. Initially, I only saw extra playlists that were blank and unnamed and either contained every song in my library or not at all. I’ve been using iTunes for 19 years. I’ve got playlists that are that old, and some real important ones that I created in the last three years. Some name playlists would show a duplicate name, outside of the folders the originals were in, But again they contain none of the songs. I discovered that my personal music files including some of my old radio shows that were supposed to be syncing across all of my devices since using Apple Music prevent you from manually syncing anymore. What had once been Music Match turned into Music Mess.

Now, with a recent update after Christmas, all of my playlists are gone. Just completely disappeared. At first it was one or two important ones, and all of the smart playlists that are part of Apple Music remained, but now it’s everything. iCloud syncing has replicated this across my iPad and iPhone and now years of curating my music has turned into an unusable library. Tier one support guy read from a script, first smugly said I should ‘just start over’. His second Suggestion was that I do a complete Migration Assistant wipe and restore of my system with a 3 TB hard drive.

It was a struggle to get passed on to somebody who knew something about the app. The tier 2 guy would not confirm my guess that I could re-import the playlists from the all iTunes files that are still on the computer. He said that there is no recommended way to restore the playlists. This is left me pretty distraught.

I copied the library to another drive and attempted to import the playlists from the XML file, which took a while but appeared to of worked. I have a large library so this had to happen over matter of days In my spare time. I figured for safety sake, I disconnected my computer altogether from the Internet, so that iCloud syncing wouldn’t be a factor in my attempt to restore the playlists. For some reason when it was complete the song count was about a quarter of what I actually had in my original library, and I saw that it was also including in that number movies and TV shows which had migrated over to the new TV app. I figured I could delete those from music, as it would not allow me to change the media kind from music video to say movie or TV show. Still, Feeling hopeful, I replaced the original library and attempted to do the same thing and import into the original Music Library, They had gotten messed up but had all of my songs. I didn’t mention before that during all this time that library had not lost any of the actual media files. I have started the import again yesterday and when I started to work on it this morning, I could see all my playlists we’re back, but the blank ones and duplicates we’re also still there. I checked to see if the approximate song counts were right, I’m starting to feel pretty good about it. I did notice that it looks like it added a duplicate copy of the songs to a lot of songs in my library, But over time I thought I could clean that up as I’d rather have twice as many that half as many.

Since I had carved out time to devote to this I figured I would start deleting the blank playlists that had no name but contained every song in my library or nothing at all, the duplicate named playlists that did not have any files in them, and generally clean up my playlist organization so that I could deal with it in my phone and iPad went in the car or entertaining. A couple of hours into it inexplicably Music just quit. When I reopened it it took several minutes before the library loaded and when it did, all I had was about 20 or 30 blank playlists and folders and smart playlists, all with either my entire library or no songs at all.

Part of my, and here is the vent as, Music being an emotional thing for me as a musician, and radio announcer, in the almost 2 decades of spending much of my Mac time dedicated to organizing my music makes this needless to say a catastrophe for me. The cavalier “just start over“, as well as the denial that there was even a problem that existed in spite of all of the forum threads on this subject just makes me think that Apple is completely ignoring the problem. I alternate between anguish and being absolutely furious.

i’ve stuck with iTunes since it was part of the iLife suite you paid $40 for the disk to install on the original iMac. I’m really hoping someone here can help me figure out how to recover these playlists and make them stay in my library.

After Music corrupted my playlists, turning most Playlists folders into Smart Playlists without my asking, I thought I would find a way to recreate them.

The idea was simple. I would painstakingly duplicate the Smart Playlists by creating a Playlist folder with the same name & do the same with all the subfolders.

From time to time, I would export the Library as XML, for safety.

It took me days but eventually I was back to my usual Library.

Sadly, I didn’t have any other backup...

One morning, I opened Music and all my work was gone. Music had automatically turned all the newly created Playlists folders into Smart Lists!

Catalina is a catastrophe for all of us who used iTunes as our music library manager.

I’ve been an Apple fan for years. Not anymore.

If you move your cursor to the right of the word Playlists in the sidebar do you see Show? If so click that to reveal the hidden lists.

tt2

Don’t do it. All my playlist disappeared

Catalina deleted all my playlists that had audiobooks in them. They're gone. I had 10 years of work into those. They did not transfer to iBooks, either. I can't believe they thought it was okay to delete peoples' work.

I should have said that a couple playlists are missing and most of the others are empty. Nothing is hidden. I can see the ones that are remaining. I decided not to waste any more time on this so I deleted the empty ones and recreated them. It seems to be working......for now.