How to restore Apple Music playlists from Time Machine backups.

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How to restore Apple Music playlists from Time Machine backups.

Hi. I have read some previous articles on this and followed the steps in them, but am having no luck in retrieving the playlist.

This afternoon I signed up for an Apple Music free trial. I had a message saying something about not being able to sync, which told me to deselect and then reselect synchronisation (I didn't catch the actual error message).

On doing so, all my playlists that were previously stored on my Apple Music locally have been nuked and no playlists are showing anywhere.

I do have a time machine backup which goes back well before I signed up, and I have restored historic versions of the music library in the /music folder, as suggested by other articles.

However, my historic playlists still do not reappear.

I read another article saying to start apple music with the option key held down to select a different library, but when I try that I get an error message as below:

However, I do not have any connected devices, I have cancelled the free apple music subscription and even tried signing out of icloud, so I cannot try and reconnect to a restored backup by choosing a different library.

When I copy my time machine backup library file in so the restored version is /music/music library there is still no playlists.

Does anyone have any ideas on where to turn next?

Where does apple music store the playlists, as it doesn't appear to be working restoring the music library from time machine?

Should I be looking for another file on my time machine backup somewhere?

Any help gratefully received. I tried an apple support chat and after 50 minutes of being sent to pages I had already said I'd looked at, I had to leave and have not received the promised follow up.

Currently every playlist collated since 2007 has been nuked. Surely there must be a time machine file somewhere over the previous months I can restore something from??

Many thanks

Jason

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 13.4

Posted on Sep 26, 2023 1:20 AM

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Answer 1

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JP24 Author

Level 1

27 points

Sep 26, 2023 4:37 AM in response to JP24

After three hours of circular discussions with apple support chat, this is now resolved (thanks to a community post actually!).

So the answer is....

Yes, the right file to get from your time machine backup is 'music library'
When you restore it to the ~/music/ folder and start apple music, your playlists still might not appear
If that's the case, you need to hold <option> and start Music to get the option to 'change library'

But wait, now you'll get another problem - the error message above, saying you have connected devices.

But you don't either? The apple support solution was "wait 24 hours for your subscription to be cancelled and try again" (despite the cancellation having been registered immediately).

The actual answer to the error message above can be found in this community post here...

"You cannot change the music library at t… - Apple Community

It works still in OSX 13.4 and Music 1.3.5.8 still. It's an error.

Turn off your wifi
Shut down your macbook
Turn the macbook on again
hold <option> and start Music
You can now select the library you restored from time machine
Turn your wifi back on

Re-opening the library in his way should fix the playlist issue and magically they all reappear.

If they don't reappear, you are properly stuffed. Apple's suggestion on the final step after this is "build your playlists manually".

Good luck with remembering what you had in the (in my case) 54 playlists I'd lost.

Here is the apple support list of steps (finally obtained from a helpful third level phone escalation person who actually answered the question I'd originally asked four hours ago and in each of my three escalated chats).

Except for the bit about the changing the music library - even that had him flummoxed but google sorted that! Go apple community.

"

Once a library file can be found to restore playlists: Quit iTunes or Music on macOS Find the existing library file. By default, this is usually C:\Users\USERNAME\Music\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl or ~/Music/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary where ~ represents the user's home folder If using iTunes or Music on macOS with a Music Library file: Rename the existing library file and add .old to the filename. If using Music on macOS with an old iTunes Library, there's no need to rename library files. Find the library file to restore, either from backup or from Previous iTunes Libraries folder Copy the library file from the current location into the location of the file in step 2 Details on restoring specific files from Time Machine can be found in HT209152 To copy the file, hold Option (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) while dragging from the current location to the library location in step 2 Rename the file to match the name before change in step 2, e.g. to remove YYYY-MM-DD format Holding Option (Mac) or Shift (Windows), launch Music or iTunes Select 'Choose Library' when asked and release the modifier key Select the file renamed in step 7 If using Music on macOS with an old iTunes library, create a new Music Library with the prompts, e.g. save it as ~/Recovered Music/ If the playlists do not appear, other than restoring an older library or another library, the next steps would be to build them manually

"

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Answer 2

Apr 26, 2024 8:50 AM in response to JP24

Hi Friends... thanks for any help you can provide here.

Here is a catch-up on my situation.

Long time iTunes user, migrated to using Apple Music almost exclusively (I would add a few mp3s here and there but largely just adding music from the service into my library).
I inadvertently bumped up against my 100,000 track sync limit and didn't understand what was going on because I had just over 99,000 tracks in my library
I called Apple (mistake) and even though I immediately asked for a senior advisor, that senior advisor told me to sign out of Apple Music on my computer.
When I signed back in, it asked me if I wanted to use iCloud Library (of course I do) and when I signed in it choked my system (running a loaded M1 MacBook Pro with 4TB HD and 32 GB RAM). Waited... waited... nothing. Had to restart my system.
Did that twice more and finally got Apple Music to boot BUT... in those failed attempts the playlists and my library data was syncing in the background and didn't have time to fully reconcile (apparently) so I lost some playlists entirely and many (100 or so) were in duplicate and triplicate (but all with varying numbers of tracks) - meaning they weren't fully synced so even though it shows up as having that playlist three times, only one (presumably the original) has all the tracks.
I wasn't sure what to do so I started googling and it led me to this post, which was helpful because I was able to retrieve my .musiclibrary file from Backblaze from the day before I called Apple.
I restored the file per these instructions and on boot, all my playlists were restored and good to go!
BUT... after my iCloud library fully opened and reconciled with this new library, it wrote over the newly restored playlists as I'm guessing it pulled the most recent "data" from the cloud.
My playlists go back 20 years. I really want to get them back up and running. Does anyone have an idea how to accomplish this? I think essentially what I need to do is completely delete and wipe out all my Apple Music from all devices (unsure how to do this or where the master set of playlists live) and then open my computer, restore from that saved backup and let that serve as the one source of truth and sync up to the cloud (because I want the cloud to be empty of the music library file)
I'm not sure if this is possible or if I'm even going about this the right way, but I doubt Apple will be of any help (they got me into this situation) so I would love any help from my fellow Apple (and music!) enthusiasts.

Thank you so much for any input.

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How to restore Apple Music playlists from Time Machine backups.

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