Why has iTunes Match deleted my playlists?

Becky S. wrote:

I encountered this situation also, except I deleted all my husband's playlists! I am a bit of a technophobe, so when you say "navigate to" I am totally lost! Is there anyway that you could do screenshots of what you mean? I can get through it with a visual. Thanks.

Becky - I've been trying to but there seems to be an issue with attaching a large quantity of screenshots. I'll see what I can do. I may have to post screenshots in multiple discussions. Below is a screenshot which relates to the "navigate to" verbiage.

(click image to enlarge)

regriff wrote:

I ran into a similar problem. Playlists weren't deleted but they were emptied. Essentially the same effect. Years of playlists gone!

This method, with a bit of effort, recovered all my playlists and their content.

Restore Old iTunes Library

1. Close iTunes
2. Navigate to %User%/Music/iTunes/
3. Rename iTunes Library.itl to iTunes LibraryOLD.itl
4. Navigate to %User%/Music/iTunes/Previous iTunes Libraries/
5. Copy newest iTunes Library file (e.g. iTunes Library 2011-11-01.itl)
6. Paste copied file into %User%/Music/iTunes/ (where you renamed file in step 3)
7. Rename file you just copied (e.g. iTunes Library 2011-11-01.itl) to iTunes Library.itl
8. Restart iTunes

Just curious -- can't you accomplish this same thing by restoring the itunes library file from Time Machine? or is there a reason that method wouldn't work?

Agreed. I don't understand why folks are jumping through these complicated hoops when all that is required is to restore the iTunes library files from a backup. Unless they don't have backups? In that case perhaps this teaches the values of having current backups.

tincha wrote:

Just curious -- can't you accomplish this same thing by restoring the itunes library file from Time Machine? or is there a reason that method wouldn't work

If you don't have Time Machine, it's a moot point. But, the reason this method wasn't an option for me is because you will lose everything that changed between backups. By temporarily restoring an older copy you can salvage playlists from a previous date, exporting them to your hard drive. Then when you revert to the latest copy, you will get all the music and changes you've applied since that old backup back. Then you restore those playlists you saved off. Agreed it's a lot of steps, but it gets the job done and you stand to lose the least amount of data.

I bascially have the same problem with my 3gs phone but ipad 2 is fine. When i syned my phone all 250 playlists which I created on my mac in my itunes library were missing. I turned iunes match off on phone & re synced and my play lists were ther again. When I turned match on the phone again playlists were gone again. Turned match off on phone and this time I am told not enough space on phone which was totally false. When I went to settings ,gernral about i was told i had 8 gigs left on phone. when i was syncing phone i clicked on music tab & started unchecking playlists to free up space & hit apply. right before my eyes i saw 200 playlist disappear on my mac & also my ipad. Would someone please explain why they were also deleted from my ipad and mac. It took me over 2hours to re import them one at a time from a back up that i had.I I then tryed syncing again. I rechecked all the playlists under the music tab and even though i was told i am over capicity the sync went through.I have all my playlists on phone now but will not turn itunes match on the phone untill itunes comes out with a update that might fix this issue. Please would some one try to explain why the playlists were also lost on my ipad & imac. Iknow that when something changes on the phone it is supposed to change on other devices now but never in a million years would I think it would remove the playlists from my mac also.

My playlists on my phone were also completely wiped out- I'm so distraught I could cry- I've spent the last few weeks getting them all ready for a big party and now I have to start all over again- with 2000 songs to start with....so friggin annoyed 😠

You just have to enable playlists in the cloud: in iTunes choose store/enable playlists (i'm not sure if its called like that for i use the german store where it's called "freigeben" - so it could also be "share playlists or some like that).

I had a similar issue -- but like regriff, my playlists are showing up, but some -- not all -- are empty. What is strange is that some of my playlists are completely fine. I can't find any factor different between the ones that were emptied and the ones that survived (these are all normal playlists, not smart playlists). I just called Apple Support, which claimed they've not seen this issue and could only suggest rebuilding the playlist.

I will try regriff's approach.

Hi I managed to retrieve playlists in this way but when I reimported them into my new library any files that were not matched by iTunes Match (ie a lot of them!) were added to the library as new tracks even though they were already in the library. This then leaves the option of deleting the original files and losing all play count data, etc or manually adding missing tracks into playlists. Very annoyed at Apple for this poor service.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE FIX!!! $24.99 DOWN THE DRAIN ON iTUNES MATCH.

Just to add I retrieved all my other playlists in the way regriff suggested. I didn't really have that many and for some reason it was only the first one which didn't work properly (I suspect due to the long album titles I had given the tracks which were bonus downloads given away to subscribers to Ash's A-Z Series). All the others imported with all tracks present and correct and in the right order. I did this without any renaming of files though - I just option-opened the other library having recovered it from Time Machine. It was pretty quick for me but would obviously be more laborious if you had more playlists. I also opened the exported tabbed playlist file in Numbers (Excel would also work) so I could quickly check the order and number of tracks was correct before moving onto the next one.

Realised it was only playlists not in folders which were lost although not all of them. The ones which didn't get lost by Match were the ones which were first alphabetically.

Smart playlists on the other hand just do not work at all on iOS.

Hello,

Thanks for the tip.

In my case, I had a backup from Time Machine, but every time that I restored the iTunes folder at ~/Music/iTunes, and then started iTunes, the playlists that where deleted earlier disappeared again after a couple of seconds. I followed regriff recipe with no avail. I tried to disabled my iCloud session, power off my iPad and iPhone, and disabled iTunes Match on all my devices without any success.

And then I decided to first restore my iTunes folder but before relaunching iTunes, I powered off my router so to not have any internet access. This worked pretty fine. My playlists that were deleted stayed there, so I exported my iTunes Library just in case. And then, I started again my router, iPhone and iPad, enabled again iCloud and iTunes Match. And now, all is good.

I think the trick in my case was to restore a previous iTunes folder at ~/Music/iTunes from Time Machine, and then disable all internet access for one minute to let time for iTunes to recreate a new iTunes Library.itl with the correct count of playlists.

HTH

The restore method worked for me. My question is "what was Apple thinking when it released Match with such a glaring defect?"

The way I save my playlists Is i created a folder on my desk top & named it music playlists. I then right click on each playlist one at a time in my itunes library & export to that folder. If you ever lose your playlists again all you do is import them back. I even took it a step further as I dragged my playlist folder on my desk top to my external HD just in case my mac HD fails.

FYI, the smart playlists disappear on an iOS 5 device even without MATCH... I'm not using Match, have never turned it on for any of my accounts.

The playlists sync over USB from my Lion Server to my iPad successfully for a brief moment -- the contents appear in the smart playlists. Then three of the five smart playlists show empty contents as soon as the wired sync completes. Can't say there's anything special about the two smart playlists that remain other than one contains only unplayed podcasts.

I have too much music to put on an iPad (so I have a 160GB iPod classic) and I use time last played and ratings to rotate music through the device. Without smart playlists I'm back to the iPod for music. So it goes.