New iMac. How can I get all my music back in iTunes?

Where was your iTunes music prior to purchasing a new mac?

 

I'm not sure how all the back up thing works with the cloud.

A quick way for you to get it back is if you have a time machine backup of your mac mini and restore it onto your new iMac. Is that an option for you?

 

I'm not sure how I can help you. I'm sorry to hear about the predicament you're in. Hopefully someone else is more knowledgable with restoring your iTunes from the cloud than I am.

Are you able to call up Apple Support for help?

 

if you can't wait, use skype or something to call Apple support in Australia. It's 4pm here atm.

Here's a list of international support numbers for you - http://support.apple.com/kb/HE57

 

What is so hard if you have all your music on your iphone? Sync the imac with your iphone through itunes

 

Because his iphone isn't registered on the new iTunes, it will want to erase the phone as soon as you link to that iTunes on the new iMac. I'm not 100% sure if it copies the music and contents first before wiping it. There's a very good chance it doesn't.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

 

i know that you can sync up to 5 different computers/devices so it is a good chance that he can sync without clear he's content.
Keep us up to date

 

With default settings, you can only sync music from any iPhone to one computer. The moment he syncs it with iTunes, it will erase the music from the iPhone.

And you'll probably need to contact iTunes support to get this sorted out. Easiest way is to email them: http://depot.info.apple.com/

 

For retrieving your music, that's easy, there's several utilities that'll let you restore it from your iPhone. I've used, and liked Phone to Mac. The recently advertised Macupdate bundle contained Disk Aid which will also do the trick.

 

For anything you ever bought from iTMS: Run iTunes, select iTunes Store, look along the right side of the homepage for a link to Purchases, follow that, look for a link to "Not on this Mac" (or something to that effect), and select that. You should see all your music & content with cloud download buttons beside it. Scroll to the bottom and there should be a Download All option. Enjoy!

If it's stuff you ripped from your own CDs, if you didn't back it up somewhere, it's gone. Either re-rip or acquire some other way...

 

Look up "Senuti" on Google. The program does what you want. It worked for me. Just make sure that you have your iTunes set so that it doesn't automatically sync.

 

This may not help but I had the same thing happen on a windows pc and phone which were stolen. All my music was on amazon but not the amazon cloud. So when I contacted them for a re-download. They told me I was out of luck and there policy was one download.
Now of course they have their own cloud service which will store all your music.didn't help me back then. So you aren't the first to loose some tunes.
By the way; Now I have three usb backup drives which I rotate monthly. Soon I will at TB Drive, because I never want to loose data again not to mention my music library.

 

+1

 

Glad I could help. There are indeed 3P apps out there to recover the contents of your iDevice as though it were an external hard drive, though since I'm not experienced with them I can't really speak to that. What I CAN recommend is you might want to consider iTunes Match. It's not free ($25/year) but it will extend the cloud download functionality to the rest of your music collection, for up to 5 computers and 10 iDevices at the same time. That way if you lose another Mac/PC in the future and you have no media library, you can sign in to Match and re-download ALL of it, not just purchased content. It also auto-upgrades some, but not all, iTMS files from the old DRM era to "iTunes Plus" DRM-free files.

Also, if you have Match and it matches up a CD you ripped or even some old album you got from P2P download, you can re-download Apple's master AAC file of the song to replace your copy. This process isn't 100% foolproof -- some folks have reported getting clean/nonclean copies of songs where their original was the other version. But it's really good most of the time, and has a great track record with reasonably common content. If your collection is thick with obscure indie titles, Match may not be as useful.

/disclosure: not an employee, not a stockholder, just a guy who has been there and done that who tries to help out fellow victims of lost-my-media-collection disasters. In my case it was due to my home being burglarized a couple years back.

 

senuti, use it all the time, works great....a little annoying to figure out how to use at first but once you do your good