Move playlists from iPhone to iTunes

Thanks for your answer to Melissa's question Chris. It told me what I needed to do to copy a playlist from my iPhone to my iTunes. I found her comment about how she solved the problem unclear. I am also unclear why she felt your answer was not the answer she asked for. By the way I used a text file for the transfer on my windows OS computer. So maybe it does not mater if you use xml or txt as the format for the file. Thanks again.

Additional question - CA's method works one playlist at a time, is there a way to do more than one at a time? I've got about 150 playlists to get through!

Oh and I too have no idea why the original poster did not find CA's answer the right one.

Thanks for the link. I had alredy done the Phoneview method, but it didn't restore the playlists for some reason (although I note that your link indicates that Phoneview does support playlist retrieval, perhaps I just did it incorrectly, can't remember as it was a while ago I did it).

You might find my thoughts on Grouping track into albums useful in regard to the whole mix albums and artist vs. album artist thing.

"Don't use playlists" isn't very constructive. "Backup & don't lose your library" is better, but obviously no use if it has already happened. I could probably write a recursive playlist rescuing script for Windows (if I could find the time) but that wouldn't be much use to you.

tt2

It looks like this solution was for the old version of iTunes. While I was still able to export the playlist from my phone there is no "import playlist" option under the "Library" menu anymore. It looks like I should be able to just drag and drop the playlist into iTunes, but it never shows up. Why isn't this working?

I was able to drag and drop it into iTunes "Playlists" when saving it as a .m3u, but there's one little problem. Though the playlist shows up with its name, there are no songs in it!
Why does Apple always have to do things the hard way? This shouldn't be difficult.

.m3u playlists are essentially a text file containing an ordered list of file paths. Given that paths to the internal storage of an iPhone are not exposed to Windows Explorer I would imagine that nothing was added to the playlist because none of the imported entries appeared valid.

I could explore the script idea a little further...

Each object, such as a track or playlist, inside iTunes can be accessed via its LibraryPersistentID. Playlists are lists of such IDs. As long as you're syncing/managing the device with one library each ID on the device ought to match up with one in the library so replicating information from the device to the library, such as play counts and ratings is relatively simple. If you have a "new" library, even built from the same original source files, then the IDs in the device created with an earlier library won't match. I wrote a script called SyncStats a while back to import ratings and play counts in such circumstances which I should be able to adapt for this purpose.

tt2

the songs are already in itunes under purchased. i'm trying to get playlists that i created on my phone with purchased items imported into itunes so i don't have to recreate my playlists just to listen to them on the computer (nor do i want to have to plug my phone in to the computer to listen to them).

The songs are sourced from one library on the computer. I simply copied the ones I wanted from iTunes onto my phone and then made a playlist of all those tracks on my phone. Now I just want to copy that playlist back onto iTunes so that if the phone crashes again I can just load that playlist onto my phone.

with the new itunes all you have to do is export the playlist from your iphone as you usually would and to import the playlist to itunes on itunes click on the top left symbol that looks like a half shaded rectangle then click show menu bar. After that you go to file>Library>Import playlist

i accidently lost all of my playlists in the new Itunes. but still got them om my iPhone and iPad. You said... export the playlists from the iphone as you usually do.... hmm how do you usually do that??

I would like to get same answer. I read other instruction with exporting importing playlist as xml.

Think is when I export my playlist on Desktop from ipod -> when I try to import the msame file in itunes libary he shows "Some of the songs in the file "playlist.xml" were not imported because they could not be found.

Commong Apple champions help us with this.....

lukarts wrote:

Think is when I export my playlist on Desktop from ipod -> when I try to import the msame file in itunes libary he shows "Some of the songs in the file "playlist.xml" were not imported because they could not be found.

Are the songs still in iTunes on your computer?

Playlists often have a list of absolute filepaths. If the files are in a different place from where they were when the playlist was saved then iTunes won't be able to add them to the list. Depending on what has moved from where to where it may be possible to correct the paths in a text editor.

tt2

I tried saving them as text files when I exported them from my iPhone, and then they imported fine that way with all of my songs showing, despite the fact no files appeared when I had originally tried to import them as .xml