iTunes 12.2.0 have deleted all of my playlists and most songs...

This was so helpful! I was as frustrated as everyone else. Thanks for saving me a phone cal!

Thanks Richard this worked for me. We shouldn't have to do this stuff though. Apple should be able to get it right first time. Bill Gates must be turning in his grave!

davidfromhebden bridge wrote:

Apple should be able to get it right first time. Bill Gates must be turning in his grave!

Perfect world and all that, but I agree. FWIW, Bill Gates is the Microsoft guy and he's not dead. 😕

This fix worked for me as well. Thanks, Richard.

My library is stored on an external drive and includes rips from albums, CD's. DVD's and so on, in addition to content purchased from Apple. When I launched iTunes this evening home sharing had been turned off and my iTunes library location had been reset to the default.

The library location usually resets when I launch iTunes without the external drive plugged in (for example I'm out and about with my laptop and launch itunes to stream radio), but once I get home, plug in the external, and relaunch iTunes everything sorts itself out. That wasn't the case this evening.

Thankfully, everything seems to be back to normal now.

Sad but true....

It was very late, I'd spent several hours on the fix, I was very tired and I was very annoyed with Apple. I know Steve Jobs is the dead guy who wouldn't stand for this poor service but I only realised what I'd written when I finally got to bed!

The problem I'm having - I think - is a little different.

iTunes shows my ripped music. This music will play.

But - after updating - the files are now missing from my hard drive. I can't find them - but the music will still play. It's so weird. My iTunes media folder only shows one album (which i ripped today). iTunes itself is showing hundreds of albums, that it can play. When I try a search iTunes it can't find it. There are no .m4a files anywhere, and of course, Get Info does not show a location.

I tried the method of older libraries and it didn't solve it. Any thoughts on what is going on?

Using 12.2.1.16 and the format is.m4a. I don't want to consolidate music in the case it creates duplicate files -- because we're talking m4a and at least a hundred different artists and whole discographies, so...I don't want to double the GB's (if that is what consolidating in fact does).

Going to take a xanax now & hope someone can help.

I was at first so furious, because my library of thousands was ALL mixed (wrong song titles with wrong artists on the wrong song on EVERY song) and then I did as you described, and then I was so relieved because all my music was organized again! But now I realize half of my songs are gone and all my playlists too. I hate Apple so much right now. I really do. I am so loyal, all my products are Apple, but WHY do they eff my music library like this?

Blessings to you Richard Grant.

This is such a royal mess.

jdmel, do the actual music files for all those missing songs still appear on your hard drive anywhere? (The logical place would be in Music > iTunes > iTunes Media > Music ... but at this stage, who knows?) I ask because at one point, a few years ago, I started noticing that certain tracks were missing, and I ended up dragging the entire Music folder into iTunes, which recovered and re-imported, as I recall, hundreds of songs that had mysteriously been deleted from the database. Crude but effective.

Stabby, this sounds very worrisome. I don't know exactly what the "consolidate" feature does, so you're probably wise to be cautious about this until you've done some further research.

From what you've said, I guess you've tried searching (for example with Spotlight) for some of the missing tracks by name, to see if they're still around somewhere?

One thing that occurs to me is that if you can still play the songs within iTunes, you might be able to do other things as well -- for example, try selecting a song and then dragging it from the iTunes window onto the desktop or into a folder. If it works, this should have the effect of making a duplicate of the file and writing it to the new location. Then you can drag this file **back** into iTunes and it should be imported in the usual way, only now you can see it again. (And you can safely delete the invisible mystery track you started with.)

I know this is the crudest process imaginable. But I think it's what I would do at this point -- I mean, apart from panic and open a wine bottle and the other customary iTunes disaster steps.

Jared, have you found any answers? This sounds like a nightmare. Unless some pro chimes in with a solution, I'd suggest setting up a call or an online chat with Apple Support.

As an interim, if you haven't installed the latest iTunes update (from just a couple of days ago) you might start with that. Now you've only got the one copy of iTunes Library.itl, right -- the one you marked as corrupt? Make a copy of that, in case it can be repaired somehow, and rename one of the copies with the original file name, so the new iTunes will have a library to open. Maybe Apple has done something wonderful and this will fix the problem, but I'm guessing that's not the case, unfortunately. This is way beyond my level of knowledge.

I was thinking I was missing some songs. But I don't think I was missing any at all, just that the song titles, artist name, and album names have been jumbled up in some songs since the 12.2 upgrade.

The reason why I think this is the case is this: I have some songs in other languages. I put the language in the song Comment field, as well as the sub genre of those of music. I noticed for example, that when I pull up my bachata playlist, one of Dido's songs is showing up. The title, artist, and album are all Dido. But the Comments still had the "Spanish; Bachata", which are the qualifiers for this playlist. When I play the song, it is one of my "missing" songs from Romeo Santos.

I followed Richard Grant's advice and now my library looks as it was before. I'm not sure I'll be turning on Music again anytime soon, though.

You are awesome!! Thanks so much.

Worked a treat, thanks heaps.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook... who cares?? You're right David, we shouldn't be spending hours online figuring out how to patch our own software. The very fact that this conversation is taking place on an Apple site should tell us all something. We've all paid HANDSOMELY for our devices and then we've paid for our music. This isn't like a bunch of tech geeks are getting together in a chat room to figure out some new idea, we are consumers blindsided by a sudden loss of our purchased material. I don't want to go into my old files and figure out how to rename then and drag then into this or that folder, man I just want to go the gym and listen to my ipod mini. We paid for the music and Apple should be WEARING THEMSELVES OUT fixing this for us.