iTunes won't open - uh oh

[Soundhound]

I was doing several things at once on my iMac (ripping a DVD, on iChat video, etc) and my mac crashed. Now it won't open iTunes. I have a 500 gig music library and hundreds of playlists etc, so I'd hate to have to reinstall iTunes and lose all that. Is that what would happen if I reinstalled iTunes?

I have Time Machine hooked up. Could I go into that and grab an iTunes prefs file from before the crash, and put that in the current system folder? Would that be something to try?

Any help would be much appreciated!!

 

[richard.mac]

yeah, try reinstalling iTunes or restore the plist or iTunes app from Time Machine. it wont do anything to your library as that is in a separate folder in your Music folder usually.

 

[Soundhound]

I think I solved it without reinstalling (I hope I did) I searched for iTunes, found a folder that seemed to house the itunes related files. (There was nothing in the System Folder called itunes.)

It was this folder: Users/Myname Folder/Music/iTunes. Loose in there were three itunes library files and some smaller ones with the same name as two of them, but smaller and with odd extensions. I'm thinking these were created, or screwed up, by the crash... By going back with Time Machine to just before the crash, I was able to which were the correct files. I took the smaller ones out of the folder, and things seem to work ok now. Whew.