Ya; mine were backed up and I found at least some of them when I had time to look. Assumes you know the filenames and extensions. Never thought to note them down because I never imagined I would have to go through this. Life's busy and I'd like to spend most of mine doing something productive rather than dredging through the digital dreck that itunes seems to create on a regular basis. Claims of raving of fanboys aside, this software is a constant source of irritation; kinda like a hemorrhoid...
For those of you who haven't found your library yet, here's the latest thing I've learned. When you start itunes and the itunes 11.2 update (again) loads its introduction screen (which means, by the way, that it has once again deleted your library - its done this to me at least half a dozen times now in the last four days, most recently about 20 minutes ago), look for the button on the screen that says "scan for media now". If you wait about 15 seconds, you'll miss it nad itunes will go to your now truncated library. Just shut it down and restart it. The introductory screen should come up again. When it restarts, hit the "scan for media now" button. itunes will now go through your computer and rebuild your library, or most of it. Depending on the size of your music library, it will take anywhere between five minutes or some larger, seemingly interminable fraction of an hour to find your files. They'll be mostly intact. Some things will be missing. If you took the time to rate your favourite songs so you could fine them more easily, for instance, the ratings will be missing... Enjoy.
For anyone that thinks I'm being a bit harsh on itunes and Apple here, let's do a little thought exercise, shall we?
Let's start with an analogy. Suppose you're travelling and book ahead to stay at a bed & breakfast at your destination. The name implies that you will get a bed to sleep in and that you will be served breakfast when you get up in the morning. When you get there and get to your room, you find that instead of a bed, there is a thin mattress, a blanket and a pillow on the floor and on the way in, they tell you that "by the way, we're not serving breakfast tomorrow morning". Given that they billed themselves as a "bed and breakfast", would you say that they just failed on both counts?
Moving on. What are computers and software for? Simply put; they are devices that allow us to store, organize, manage and analyze large volumes of data efficiently. itunes, specifically, is a software program that looks like it was designed to store and manage data in the form of media files.
Given that itunes keeps losing my data, I'd say that it fails as a means to store data. Since I find it difficult to manage the data that itunes keeps losing, I'd have to also say that it fails as a data manegement device as well. A lot like the bed and breakfast with no bed and no breakfast, it fails on both counts.
Then again, maybe I'm altogether wrong. m\Maybe Apple just sees it as a marketing and sales tool to hoover money out of the users' pockets. Who cares if they actually get any utility out of it?
If I were wrong, they would have fixed this thing by now. The fact that they haven't tells me plenty.
