Help help help please! iTunes music disappeared!

[elaine353]

Hey,

I have a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and I was running Safari and iTunes. My computer froze and was completely unresponsive so I forced it to shut down and restarted. When it started again Safari ran fine but it wasn't until i opened iTunes* an hour later I found all my music had disappeared.

I've looked on forums and tried everything: I updated and restarted, I tried to repair disk permissions, I tried "Import a new playlist" to import the iTunes library and the .xml file but nothing works.

The weird thing is there are a few songs in it and they're the first songs I put on my iTunes like 4 years ago.

All of my music is in a folder iTunes Music but i don't want to have to reimport everything, it will take ages so is there something i haven't tried??????

*When i opened it a message came up that said it had to make a new file or something iTunes Music (damaged)

** Also my computer has the same amount of free space as it did before the crash so i assume nothing has been completely wiped.

 

[Kevriano]

Have you tried dragging the library folder into iTunes?

 

[elaine353]

I'm doing that now (so obvious can't believe i didn't think of that sooner, cheers), it seems to be working but it has erased all my ratings and playlists and podcasts!

 

[elaine353]

Do you know of anyway to possibly just restore it with all of the ratings and playlists etc?

 

[Kevriano]

If you still have the playlists xml, you can import that after. It will be in the top level of your original iTunes music folder.

 

[elaine353]

I have 2 of those files for some reason. I imported them both but it didn't do anything apart from duplicate the list on the sidebar like TV Shows, Movies, Genius etc

 

[elaine353]

And it duplicated most (but not all) of the songs in iTunes.

 

[Kevriano]

Ok. I'll get back to you a little later.

 

[Kevriano]

Right>
If you have the playlist xml file from your original library,drag it to your desktop and do the following:

# From the File menu, choose Import.
# Navigate to and select one of the exported playlist files on your Desktop.
# Click Choose.

This should put all of your playlists back in place.