iTunes deleting playlist repeatedly?

[jangoforhire]

Ok so today for the first time ever my iTunes randomly deleted all of my playlists. So i looked up a few articles online and tried a few things.

First, I took the ituneslibrary.itl file out to the desktop, opened iTunes, pointed iTunes to this file with file>Library>add to library.This did not work.

Next, I deleted the iTunes Music Library.xml file (after making a backup) because I have heard that this file will automatically regenerate to fix itself (which it did) but this still did not fix my problem.

Next, I went into time machine, grabbed the ituneslibrary.itl file from a day ago, and copied it into the place of the existing file. Now I opened iTunes and this worked, all my playlists were back, until my genius playlists started updating at which time they all disappeared again.

So this time, I did the above steps again, but this time i turned off wifi before i opened iTunes and bam, the playlists stayed. But when i turn on wifi, they disappear again.

does anyone have any clue whatsoever what is going on here and how I can stop my playlists from deleting?

 

[kmvguy83]

Are you subscribed to itunes matching service?
it's happening to me too...
so just today i started to back up my playlist by exporting library

let me know if you find the fix, its so annoying

 

[jangoforhire]

I am, I have been subscribed since the beta release of iTunes 10.5.1 and never had a problem. Now all of a sudden I tried to download a pre-ordered album today and when it finished downloading all my playlists vaporized. I'm still working on it I'll keep you posted. Any one else having similar problems/know of a fix?

 

[jangoforhire]

This did not work for me, but its worth a try/read for anyone else with similar problems.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3496092?start=0&tstart=0

 

[jangoforhire]

Ok I found a method thats working so far.

Heres the deal,

1. Turn off iTunes Match (Store > Turn Off iTunes Match)
2. Quit iTunes
3. Get an old copy of your iTunes Library.itl file (iTunes saves old versions of this in the music folder, or I simply went back a few hours in time machine and grabbed an old version, I also grabbed the iTunes Library Extras.itl and iTunes Library Genius.itl files just for good measure)

4. Replace the files in the user/music/itunes folder with the backups you got from step 3.

--This step can be tricky--
5. Now for some reason, even though we turned it off in step 1, iTunes likes to automatically turn match back on when we change the library file. This is most likely because the old library file that we copied in had match enabled.

But if this happens, you have to repeat step 1 as fast as possible before match updates and deletes your playlists again.

So, launch iTunes, and go to Store > Turn Off iTunes Match as fast as possible. If you don't get it right your have to quit and copy the files in again.

6. Now, go to the iTunes store, and click on the iTunes match button on the right hand side. Click add this computer and let it gather info about your library (with the playlists this time)

Thats working for me so far.