Help! Need to consolidate 3 iTunes music folders (ugh)

[betsbillabong]

I have a powerbook with a couple of external drives attached to it. For a long time I had two iTunes libraries: a big one (on an external) and a small one (on my powerbook). I used a script from Doug's iTunes scripts called "iTunes Library Manager" to switch back and forth between the two libraries.

In the meantime a couple of years went by, and my "small" powerbook library grew to be really big. Almost the same size as the "big" one.

Last week I needed to complete a high-media project on my powerbook. So after doing my weekly backup/clone (via Super Duper) to a backup drive (different from the one that has the "big" iTunes library on it), I got rid of my iTunes music folder. During the week that followed, I put a few things on the local powerbook iTunes library, but nothing crucial.

My problem is that I now have three "iTunes music" folders, each with different music on them. I would like to consolidate everything onto the external drive, and just run iTunes off of that most of the time. I've looked around the web but can only find info on moving everything at one time to an external. Oh, and by the way, the external with the "big" iTunes music folder on it does not have an OS on it, it's just storage.

Help! I'm going out of town and want to have this wrapped up by the time I leave. Thanks in advance!

 

[betsbillabong]

Update... missing playlists

Okay. So since I didn't hear back, I decided to just consolidate the libraries. It worked pretty well... except for playlists. I realize now that I should have done an "add to library" to generate a new iTunes Library file for the "big library" (which actually didn't have anything but the "iTunes Music" folder. And then maybe consolidating to that it would have brought the library information in. But since I consolidated without building a library for the main destination music folder first, I am basically back to square one.

Any ideas for restoring my playlists? I had changed the name of the #2 library (which had the main playlists) to "iTunes Library (old)" so I still have it.

What can I do? I hate to lose my playlists...