Found THE Solution to Restoring Missing or Empty Playlists

Hello!

I thought this would be good to share because it freaking worked after disaster for over 2 weeks of restoring Time Machine Music over and over again.

Funny enough, I found the answer in a closed thread for Music Windows, but this is the important part.

Additional steps for iCloud Music Library users

Optional, use if content has been removed from iCloud Music Library in error

If you have access to iCloud Music Library as part of an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription disconnect from the Internet before restoring the old database...

The poster of this delightful information was turingtest2 and it made all the difference.

Very long but read if you want:

I had to move the physical music files from my Mac Mini M1 to an external drive because I ran out of space. Once I did that and reconnected it through Settings, all he** broke loose. It created another Music folder inside the Media/Music folder, separating artists and albums, so when I would look at an artist in the app, I would have with the same album, but different songs within each one. I did try to do the Get Info and change them all to the same artists & album, turned off auto organize, but still was missing a lot! I have been using iTunes/Music since 2006, I have a ton of titles from copying my CDs, and online purchases. I also have playlists going back that far that are named by the date they were and who was there when we created it.

After becoming very frustrated, decided to start over. BIG MISTAKE!

Created a brand new library, I both Imported from the folder and dragged over some folders and BOOM. playlists were there but EMPTY, then they were just gone.

I read that restoring from a backup would fix this so went as far back as I could and restored. Still empty playlists. Tried a couple of ways to do this, but same result.

FINALLY, found the above information about turning off the internet, eh voila! It worked! I immediately exported all the playlists and rebuilt a new library then imported the playlists.

So, if you are desperately trying to restore playlists,

1. start by restoring to replace all the Music files from Time Machine,
2. turn off Internet,
3. option-click open Music app to select a Previous Playlist, and give it time to load,
4. export each individual playlist, and close Music app.

What to do next depends on your desired final result, I had a couple of motives.

One motive was to clean-up my catalog getting rid of Unknowns, duplicates, etc. and setup the Music folder with the corrected files, and the other motive being getting my playlists back, which I now had. I opened the Music app to default Library, connected to the updated Media Folder and again, waited. The playlists were gone, but I imported them from the TXT files and YAY!!, there they were there, songs and all!

Having gone through this more times than any sane person should, I have some feature suggestions for the Music developers, which I did pass along on the appropriate Apple page, but will share them here, as well.

1. There needs to be a way to 'rescan' or 'refresh' the library with the files folder, it doesn't see to do that automatically sometimes
2. Duplicate files should replace the old ones, not make duplicates, or provide the option.
3. There should be some kind of playlist database that can be restored without having to export each individual one. Thanks goodness I could restore all of them at once.

I hope someone finds this helpful! Thanks for the time! Good luck!

Lisa **** ***

[Edited by Moderator]