Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
I updated (stupidly) to Apple iTunes 12.2.0.145 and now all my music files are gone and all my playlists are gone too. What do I do? I have an enormous music library on a separate hard drive, so this is important to me.
MacBook Pro (17-inch Late 2011), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)
I had that exact same problem! I have a massive library as well. Everything was gone! Granted the physical files were still in my iTunes folder it's just iTunes was empty! Music, playlists, apps, audiobook, play counts, iTunes settings, etc all gone! I have multiple iTunes backups that I make once a week or so. I tried using a fresh backup & I still had the same problem. I tried using the directions found in this Apple Support Document, and that didn't work for me. But I've heard it works for some people. I'd say try that. If you don't see your content after updating iTunes - Apple Support
If that doesn't work (it didn't for me), I found an old version of iTunes on the net (12.1.2) and, using terminal commands, was able to remove 12.2 & was able to downgrade. That worked for me. However, I had to use a backup of my iTunes library folder because 12.2 corrupted my primary iTunes folder. Fortunately my backup is only 5 days old and I'm only missing 1 app & 16 songs, which is no big deal because they're still in the currupted iTunes folder so I just drag & drop them into the new iTunes and that's it.
Hopefully one of these methods works for you. Good luck!
Sadly, I have just backed up my iTunes, and in the process, discovered that my original iTunes Library.itl file was damaged, and with it, the new, duplicated, file also damaged. So I was prompted to create a new Library itl file, which of course has no playlist information.
Thus did I lose years worth of playlists, all in the course of backing up! My original media are all there, over 100GB of music, but no playlists.
So now I look forward to the 'joy' of recreating all my playlists.
Thinking hard about an alternative to iTunes. Perhaps going back to my CD collection, ha ha!
This is a very bad and fragile system. Too bad so many people are reliant on it.
By definition a backup should leave all of the source files untouched. 😕
Try Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash. If you have a Previous iTunes Libraries folder try an older copy of your iTunes Library.itl file, or restore one from Time Machine if it is active.
tt2
Same happened to me - I lost all my playlists and although Apple helped me get some of my music back, I had to search out the remainder which
was still missing. I have had enough - this is the second major problem I have had. I am now reverting to Spotify (free version) and going to rely on streaming with adverts from now on - can't stand the hassle of trying to recover etc. Bring back VINYL and CDs where I can safely store them in my cabinet!
itunes 12.2.0.145 has lost all my music files! Help!
