iTunes does not show any playlists and the only songs have a cloud icon next to them. This is only a small selection of songs I have, and some I have not bought

Question

iTunes does not show any playlists and the only songs have a cloud icon next to them. This is only a small selection of songs I have, and some I have not bought

I think Apple are trying to encourage people to use the iCloud by putting some free songs there that they see in iTunes, but yesterday the playlists in mine just disappeared, and only these iCloud songs are there.

I have not backed up or sent anything to iCloud.

The original music files are in the Music/iTunes/iTunes Music directory in my hard drive.

How can I get iTunes to see these files again, or alternatively, how do I extract albums to another app? I guess I could use the last backup to do this.

Any ideas for an alternative to iTunes?

Apple messed up iPhoto for 2 or 3 years at least before recently releasing Photos, which seems to work well, but what about the intervening time? I'm not waiting 3 years to listen to my music again.

They've messed up video in the latest 10.10.3 upgrade. It's beginning to feel like a bad version of Windows. Will xxxxx work when I next switch on the computer?

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), 2.8 GHz Intel core 2 duo; 4GB RAM

Posted on Apr 26, 2015 8:38 AM

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Answer 1

May 25, 2015 12:58 PM in response to Peter Blackburn

No help, no reply? I don't believe no one has had the same issue.

Changing an important application that contains collections like this is so counter-productive that it might be a deal breaker for me when buying the next computer. If I have to fool around like this to get my photos and recordings to show up easily, then I might as well engage with Linux. There are forums and individuals who fix that family of operating systems. Here we have individuals who can sometimes help, but cannot fix the system as it is not open.

Anyone from Apple reading this? Worth pondering.

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

272,743 points

May 25, 2015 1:01 PM in response to Peter Blackburn

See Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash. If you have TimeMachine active you can restore a recent version of the .itl from there instead.

And no, Apple don't read these forums as a rule.

tt2

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Answer 3

May 28, 2015 10:07 AM in response to turingtest2

Thanks. I guessed not. I think I'll get the last back up and copy playlists out to another disk. A computer is supposed to make tasks easy, not involve hours of puzzling out how changes have occurred. I sorted music by composer but now iTunes uses tags (which are not consistent), so music could be anywhere, and not even in the same playlist.

Opportunity there for someone to write a simple iTunes alternative that stores the music as it was entered to the program, ie by CD or download, and allows the user to determine the categories.

I would pay $10-20 for such a program, as long as it had a try before you buy option and really did the job.

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