Music Deleted From Playlist, Library and Computer

A couple of months ago, I must have accidentally deleted a playlist while trying to add songs from another playlist to it. (Let's call the playlist Favorite Songs. When I synced my iPhone to my iMac, there was suddenly a Favorite Songs and Favorite Songs 1 playlist. I dragged and dropped all the songs from Favorite Songs 1 into Favorite Songs and hit skip for the duplicate additions, then meant to delete Favorite Songs 1 and keep FS. Both seemed to have been deleted.)


I noticed recently that I couldn't find several of my favorite songs on my library or computer. Then I went through a couple of albums and realized that perhaps 2,000 or more songs were completely deleted from the computer with the playlists several months ago. I researched this and I've never found anything like this happening. I don't need the playlist back, just the songs.


So, here's where it gets complicated. I have my Apple Music Library backed up to the Cloud and it syncs every time I open Apple Music on my iMac. But I opened the iCloud Library and didn't find those songs in there-- maybe I didn't look in the right place. There are a couple other options:


  1. I have a hard drive of a lot of my music, but not all of it. On that drive is a file with my iTunes/Apple Music library from a couple of years ago, so some of the songs I've lost will be on it, but not nearly all. Would restoring or opening that file from the hard drive cause issues with my current Apple Music, such as loss of all the songs that have been added to it since?
  2. Could I restore my Apple Music to a few months ago, trying to maybe find a time when those songs were on there? Would the files I've added to my computer still be there and could maybe be added to the Apple Music library... or would those, too, be lost?

iMac 24″, macOS 13.1

Posted on Apr 8, 2025 12:48 PM

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4 replies

Apr 8, 2025 01:23 PM in response to buddyobush

Apple Music's cloud library doesn't (sadly) feature Time Machine's snapshot abilities. If you have songs that only exist in the cloud and delete them from your iCloud Music Library they disappear everywhere immediately, or as soon as each device syncs with the cloud. If they are stored locally on a computer somewhere they get marked as Removed in the iCloud Status column. These can be selected and added back to the library.


In principle you can open any iTunes/Music library and enable Sync Library to merge in all of the content in that library with your Cloud Music Library. If the iTunes library predates Mojave it needs to be updated in Mojave* before it can be converted to Music. macOS 12.x Monterey is also useless at converting iTunes libraries, but Ventura should be OK.


If you have Time Machine backups of your Music library it is possible to take your computer offline, restore a backup .musiclibrary package, open it, xport a playlist, revert to the "current" library, go back online, and import the exported list. Such an import will only succeed fully if all of the tracks referenced by the list are on the paths remembered by the old library. I.e. this isn't going to help restore lost tracks unless those can also be found and restored from Time Machine or some other source.


tt2


* If you need help updating the library to something compatible drop me a line, contact details in my profile here.

Apr 8, 2025 01:52 PM in response to turingtest2

Yeah, I'm on Ventura. So, to get deeper into the weeds (sorry!), I have a Time Machine backup on a hard drive (#1) that hasn't been run in about a year. Separately, I have a hard drive (#2) on which I have a lot of my music AND, on that disk, but separately, a backup of my iTunes library that I probably made a couple years ago. The biggest problem with all this, by the way, is not knowing exact what's missing. If there was somehow I could even just glimpse at the playlist I had before it was deleted sometime a few months ago, I would be able to probably track down many of the songs and add them back from drive #2, and the rest... well, at least I would know what's missing and figure out how to get them individually.

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Music Deleted From Playlist, Library and Computer

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