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