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APCRFT Author

Level 1

8 points

How do I recover itunes playlists?

Yesterday almost all the playlists had gone from my library. I lost all my personally curated playlists plus default ones like Recently Added and Recently Played. All that's left is Purchased and Genius. Also the History is blank in the Playback tab. How can I get these back?

I haven't deleted any of these playlists. I haven't knowingly upgraded iTunes: I'm on 12.8.2.3 which is a couple of months old. I last used the playlists on Sunday. I don't have a weird set-up where iTunes is on an external hard-drive or anything like that. This is as vanilla as it gets.

I have read the support note about resetting to a previous version of iTunes Library.itl. It shouldn't really apply because I don't think this loss was caused by an upgrade but the most recent previous version dates from March last year, so that doesn't seem like it will recover enough data to make it worthwhile.

I have a Time Machine backup from 10 days ago. Can I recover iTunes Library.itl from that without breaking anything?

BTW I'm on High Sierra 10.13.6.

MacBook Pro 13"

Posted on Jul 20, 2019 1:57 AM

Top-ranking reply

turingtest2

Level 10

274,540 points

Posted on Jul 20, 2019 7:19 AM

See Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash - Apple Community. Yes, pulling back the .itl file from Time Machine ought to work.

tt2

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How do I recover itunes playlists?

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