Why has iTunes Match deleted my playlists?

This didn't work for me. Apparently iTunes has deleted all of my music that was not purchased through iTunes. I have gone back through my Time Machine backups for the past 2 weeks and the music is gone. I purchased iTunes Match yesterday so as much as I would like to blame that, I don' think that is my problem.

Any ideas where my music is?

C

I have all my songs but none of the fixes above have restored my playslists. This has happened to me several times, sometimes after itunes updates sometimes simply after turning the computer off and on again. Previously, I've just copied over the library from backups, but now I've bought new music and don't want to wipe it. Also, even if I go to the hassle of saving the new music separately, this clearly isn't a sensible solution - it's ridiculous that I keep loosing the playlists!

Any new suggestions on how to fix this?

And any ideas on how to prevent it happening again?

Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks, Emmanuel! You just saved me hours of work. I simply turned the wifi off on my computer, restored the previous iTunes library and waited for a few minutes before turning Wifi back on. When Match started, everything stayed put! 🙂

Thanks! Your fixed worked. I didn't even know what Match was, but I accidentally touched it on the iPhone and then cancelled it. Then tonight I was surprised to find all the playlists empty. I'm going to do an epic drive bringing my son home from college. It's not that I don't enjoy some of his music, but twenty hours is probably more than I could handle.

I Only use an ipad an iPhone so I don't get your solutions. I literally spent hours putting a running playlist on my phone and then thought, gee wouldn't it be great to sync this to my ipad. $25 bucks later I have NO ******* PLAYLISTS!!!!!!!!!!! What kind of ******** is this??? Does Apple really not give a **** about any of their billions of customers? I've never felt more ripped off.

In my opinion. iTunes Match is terrible. It takes forever to sync when you switch it on or back off. There's a lot of bugs that need to be worked out and it tends to be very inconvenient. Apple is very selfish when it comes to media. They make it very difficult to share your own music between your own devices if not purchased from them. Say if you make a playlist on your iPhone. You can't transfer it to your Mac of another iDevice even if you have iTunes Match activated on all your iDevices. They only way to seamlessly sync your music between all your apple products is to purchase it through Apple. I purchase a lot of music that is not available on iTunes. Music from Beatport and Juno Downloads. Which makes thing more difficult. I have to transfer all these purchases into iTunes and then either transfer it manually or update iTunes Match. That's fine but it takes forever for iTunes Match to sync. They are copying all the music they don't have on their network to make it available to stream. I wonder if they have the rights sell the music that they just copied from me. Thats another good question and a little off topic. Back to the issue at hand. When I first set up iTunes Match I was very excited. I thought it would match my music on all my devices no matter what changes were made on whatever device. Apparently that is not the case. The Mac/PC that you set up iTunes match with is the only location that you can make changes. If you make your changes there it will change on all your devices. So don't bother making playlists on the go because your just going to have to recreate it on your computer. Apple needs to figure this out and make it easier to manage. I absolutely love their products but nothings perfect. I'm sure the service of iTunes Match is a very intricate legal web of rights and rules, but improvements can be made to help us all out. Only time will tell what the future of iTunes Match will become. We just have to sit back and wait for it to happen.

P.S. I'm not going to renew my iTunes Match account. I'm going to manage my media manually. If you want something done right you gotta do it yourself.

This fixed my problem: deleted playlists on iPhone then synched to iMac iTunes and my playlists were deleted on the iMac. This is why Apple is so great. Yes there is the occasional jerk that chastises us "less than brilliant people" but for the most part everyone is cool and wants to help. Thanks! About to order my iPhone 6 plus now😎

If anyone is still without remedy to this problem, I just "found" my old playlists on my phone (i4s). Open iTunes, in the lower icon bar you see RADIO, PLAYLISTS, ARTISTS, SONGS, and MORE.....Click MORE. You then see a vertical list containing ALBUMS, GENRES, COMPILATIONS, COMPOSERS, and SHARED.....Click SHARED. I forgot my wifes name is on my laptop because it used to be hers. I checked her name instead of my phones name which was currently checked......Wa-La.....my playlists were in there and reappeared on my phone.

Okay - maybe you can help me with this. I had playlists I created on my phone from songs I had purchased. They were synced to the cloud then the computer. Remember the key - I created these ON MY PHONE. I didn't renew my iTunes Match and it deleted EVERY playlist from my phone. They are still on my computer, but they won't sync back to my phone. It tells me my last backup was yesterday, but when I try to restore it then tells me my last backup was almost two years ago. I have renewed iTunes Match (there's a scam right there) but still can't get my playlists back on my phone. It's telling me that they are icloud playlists and won't let me duplicate the playlists as playlists on the computer.

Looks like I've lost music too.

What "genius" in Cupertino developed a new version of iTunes that has the capacity to erase your playlists? Fire their ***! Good thing Mike posted this because it works. What the heII kind of jiggery-pokery is this (hey if that imbecile on the SCOTUS can use it, so can I)?

Was this a ploy to get us to use Apple Music? I don't do lossy music. Get that through the apple skins.

Thanks, Ryan

This approach also works if you accidentally delete a playlist on a device linked to Apple Music. This action deletes the playlist from iTunes.

However, I found that to fully recover the playlists so that they persisted I had to disconnect my home computer (main iTunes install) from the internet first to stop it deleting the playlists when iTunes was reinvoked after replacing the backup .itl file. Then I could duplicate the old playlists at leisure, in effect creating new ones that my iTunes account didn't know about. Once I reconnected the machine to the internet, Apple Music then removed the deleted playlists and I was left with the duplicates only. Which I could subsequently rename and export as you suggest.

Mine did the same thing initially and then they magically came back.

It's a magical system

Ryan,

Thanks, I had empty platlists for another reason but your solution worked perfectly for me to get all my playlists back.

Best regards,

Dan

Glad to have helped! Hopefully the original poster will mark this as a "correct answer" so we can help other folks out in the same situation.

Cheers,

Ryan

hughes.mike wrote:

Any ideas of how I can retrieve my playlists?

Restore from your backup?