Lost all of my music and playlists

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Level 1

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Lost all of my music and playlists

I purchased and downloaded a TV episode from the ITunes Store and it was going slow so I paused the download and restarted ITunes. When I did I found all of my music gone and was greeted with the typical stuff you get when you first start up a ITunes after installing. I looked for a solution here and something that kept getting linked to was this No content shows up in iTunes after updating - Apple Support

I tried to follow the steps but I can't get past Step 5 because there is no Previous iTunes Libraries folder.

After scanning for media it appears I've got my music purchased from the store back, but my other music and all playlists are gone.

It is imperative that I get my playlists back. I'm a DJ. A fairly new one at that, and while I always meant to back my **** up, I guess I just figured it'd never be a problem or I'd get to it eventually. Bad mistake.

Any help would be appreciated here...

Itunes-OTHER, Windows 8, null

Posted on Mar 1, 2015 10:15 PM

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Answer 1

broskirose Author

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Mar 2, 2015 12:54 PM in response to broskirose

Any help would be appreciated. I have a gig in two days and really need access to my playlists!

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Answer 2

hhgttg27

Level 5

5,591 points

Mar 2, 2015 1:11 PM in response to broskirose

See turingtest2's user tip on Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash. If you really don't have anything in Previous iTunes Libraries (which would suggest that either you've inadvertently deleted these files in the past, or you've only had iTunes 12 running on this computer - the last automatic creation of a "backup" copy of the library would have happened when upgrading from 11.4 to 12.0, in October 2014 if you updated when the latter was released) you may still be able to recover your playlists by:

locating older *.itl files that have ended up elsewhere on your computer
making use of .tmp files that iTunes may leave in the iTunes folder if it crashes or is interrupted - if you have one or more of these files, identify the one that is the largest and of most recent date, rename this iTunes Library.itl (having first renamed any existing file with that name, so that you're not over-writing anything) and restart iTunes
if you have a copy of your iTunes library on an iDevice, see tt2's other tip on Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device for methods by which this could be retrieved

Obviously, you're right that not creating and maintaining a backup is a bad idea ... see yet another of tt2's notes on Backup your iTunes for Windows library with SyncToy for a suitable/recommended method. For reference, at any time I will have three complete copies of my iTunes library available, one of which is never more than a day out of date, and the other two never more than a week.

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