My Music App playlists are missing. They are not Apple Music playlists.
I'm so frustrated. I've spent all day trying to retrieve missing playlists from my desktop iMac. When I open the Music App on the desktop, Playlists is not an option under Library, and down under All Playlists, each connected device shows nothing.
When I search the web and Apple Discussions, for info, everything I've found so far relates to Apple Music or iTunes so the screens for fixes aren't the same. We have two users logged in to one iCloud account. This is for 6 devices (1 iMac desktop running Monterey 12.6, 2 iPhones 13, 1 Apple Laptop Pro, One iPod Air, One Mac Laptop) all logged in. The iOS devices are all running 15.6 or 7.
On 4 of the devices, all of the music except one small album, disappeared. On the Laptop Pro, the albums for the second iCloud user are there but the playlists are missing. All settings on all devices are logged in to the same iCloud account, all are on the same wifi connection, all Music App settings are the same on the joint desktop. I managed to retrieve the albums for one iCloud user; I have my albums on my iPhone only but no playlists..
I've tried retrieving from Time Machine-no luck; the backups for the phones is too recent and is only duplicating. I'ver tried copying from a Backup, also too recent. The one iPod Air have a backup over a month old but, right now, doesn't have enough space to copy the backup that probably has the right settings.
We did have an Apple Music account but ended it in July. However, I can't believe Apple holds playlists hostage that were once a part of Apple Music. All of these playlists were created from within the Music App a long time ago. None were created in Apple Music.
Can someone please advise on how to retrieve what I assume is still buried somewhere on the desktop? Can I retrieve via ~/Library/???...?
I would very much appreciate help with this. We're each missing playlists important to us.
Thanks.
iMac