How can I recover a my iTunes library on my older MacBook Air?

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Level 1

4 points

How can I recover a my iTunes library on my older MacBook Air?

Hello there, I have a 10 year old MacBook Air from which I was having issues sharing photos. To cut a long story short, all the photos are now on a pen drive and the lovely chaps that were dealing with it for me ended up putting a new operating system on the machine (Mac HD?). Nearly all of my iTunes library has disappeared since they did this, a gathering of 10 years worth of CDs that I had copied to it and a lot of albums I had bought from Amazon as well as iTunes. I have gone on to the Apple Music app on my Mac and gone through the process on the iTunes Store to check purchases, but as I said, a lot of what I had was either CDs that I had copied to it, or purchases from Amazon. Is there anyway I can find these? I am devastated, as I no longer have access to a lot of the CDs. I have seen some posts mention going onto the iTunes file, but I have no idea what that means, and when I look in Finder there is no mention of iTunes or music. I am fairly computer illiterate, so don't understand a lot of what is on other posts on here I'm afraid...

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.7

Posted on Aug 8, 2024 9:10 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 8, 2024 3:32 PM in response to EbrieBurn

Try searching with spotlight the names of songs from a CD that was ripped. You might get lucky and find some.

First try and recover songs from Apple by trying to reload all purchased songs from Apple iTunes or Music.

If those above don’t pay any fruit, try calling Apple Tech support at 1-800-MY-APPLE, it’s free and they may help you to recover more of the songs.

You might consider in the future, to copy all songs to a remote device; usb stick, hard drive, DVD or CDROM.

The thing that most don’t know, is that if Apple loses music rights or removes artists or labels for whatever reason. The music you bought will be removed from online. Protect your investment by copying the songs for your behalf if this happens. And then, if and when a hard drive fails or you get another system, you might have recovered your entire music collection.

the title of one of my songs; MUSIC IS THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

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Answer 2

EbrieBurn Author

Level 1

4 points

Aug 8, 2024 9:30 PM in response to supercondr

Thank you so much. I had always thought that because they were in iTunes that they were safe, because I could listen on my phone etc as well as my laptop. I ended up on a call with apple support yesterday evening, and remembered that I have quite a lot in the music library on an old iPhone, that weren’t showing up in the library on the Mac. They told me that I can’t put them back from the phone to the Mac, but I’m sure that in all my searching yesterday I saw a few mentions of this?

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