How can I restore my Playlists in the MUSIC App?

tt2, thank you, thank you, thank you!! I think I got it back.

I could not delete the Music folder in ~Users/Gary(must be a system thing) so I deleted the entire contents. Then I looked back in my time Machine Backups and found a copy of the ~Users/Gary Music folder that I thought was good and restored the entire file ~Users/Gary/Music then did a complete shut down and restart. When I opened music I was almost disappointed as the playlists were still not there. I found that my operating system (not able to mention) had created a new Music Library.musiclibrary outside of the Music Folder. The original was in the Music folder so I deleted the new Music Library.musiclibrary then moved the old Music Library.musiclibrary out of the old Music folder. I launched Music and all the playlists were there!

I hope all that I have written makes sense. I could send some screenshots or recordings to clarify if you would like.

I am going to check through everything in the next couple days and see if everything is back to the original" I will keep you updated.

Again, thank you very much for the help!

Thank you for the quick reply. I do not think that will help me as I do not have iTunes on my iMac.

If I am not mistaken, iTunes has not been around for about 3 years in the Mac OS since Catalina.

On June 3, 2019, Apple has stated that they will no longer be including iTunes for future Mac computers, starting from the operating system macOS Catalina, instead splitting iTunes into separate apps: Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts.

tt2, sorry for not getting back to you yesterday. I did reply but it did not go throw for ? reasons.

I will look into the link further, thanks.

I do have Time Machine backups of the music files. I did not transfer to a new computer. I last saw the playlists about a month ago and I am not an Apple Music subscriber.

I will explain the whole situation. First I installed the latest OS sometime this past summer.. I do not know how to find the exact date that I installed it.

Next, about 60 days ago, I synced my iPhone with my Apple Music on my iMac. Something went wrong with the sync as the album art was all switched up between artists, most songs were duplicated in my play lists and some music was missing. Rather than try to sync again, I thought I should keep everything the same on the iPhone until i figured out what went wrong. I did not want to end up losing everything. It has taken years on and off to compile my playlists from 15GB of music. Next I tried replacing the Music folder and the Music Library.musiclibrary on the iMac from a Time Machine backup. That is when I lost all of my playlists and smart playlists. Before I had replaced the two files, I backed up, the one that I was replacing, to my external HD. After I saw that my playlists were gone, I tried putting the original two files back and still no playlists!

Is there a separate file that stores the playlist information other than The Music folder and the Music Library.musiclibrary? If so I have not been able to find it and if does exist maybe I can replace it with a Time Machine backup.

I really appreciate your help.

Thanks, I’ll try that this evening.

Where I have my music stored may be the problem. In my efforts to get the playlists and songs back to where they were, I had changed the folder from ~/Music/Music/Media another folder in my user files ( users/Gary/music/music).

Does the ~ indicate a library file ?

So if I delete the Music/Music folder and the Music Library.musiclibrary then restore the ~/Music/Music/Media and the Music Library.musiclibrary from a backup that should work?

Also when you say ~/Music/Music/Media, does the Media just mean all of the music folders with the actual songs in them