Recovering iTunes Playlists After Restore from TM?

[safelder]

I recently experienced my first Mac catastrophe. Fortunately, I had both CCC and TM backups that I could rely on to recover. Unfortunately, when I recovered my iTunes library, although some information from the ITL file survived (playcounts and ratings, for example), regular playlists didn't (smart playlists did). I have no XML backups because I thought this data lived in the ITL. Am I out of luck, or is there someplace else I should be looking?

 

[GGJstudios]

I recently experienced my first Mac catastrophe. Fortunately, I had both CCC and TM backups that I could rely on to recover. Unfortunately, when I recovered my iTunes library, although some information from the ITL file survived (playcounts and ratings, for example), regular playlists didn't (smart playlists did). I have no XML backups because I thought this data lived in the ITL. Am I out of luck, or is there someplace else I should be looking?

Your playlists are usually stored in a subfolder in

~/Music/iTunes Libraries/iTunes Mac/​

which should also contain your iTunes Library.xml file.

 

[dknightd]

Assuming you are on a Mac, with a default iTunes configuration, all your playlists should be in
~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.itl

When you restored this .itl file you should have got all your playlists back.

I can't explain why you did not - but I can speculate. Maybe your mac crashed when it was trying to write this file. In which case you'll have to go back to an older version.