Restoring music to itunes

Before buying a new iMac i backed up my iTunes via Time machine to an external hard drive but I am having problems restoring my music to my new computer.

I have tried removing the Music folder from Finder to the desktop and copying the backed up iTunes folder to the music folder but iTunes will not show any of the albums and films etc, although they are visible via finder.

If anybody has any ideas i would be most grateful. I thought I was getting the hang of Mac computing!!

Many thanks

You need to add them to iTunes - not the folder structure.

At the point you are at: I would move everything in your Music folder back out - to eliminate duplicates from occurring. Then drag the Music folder you copied onto your desktop and drop it onto the iTunes icon in the Dock.

"Assuming" you have the default settings (in iTunes - Preferences - Advanced) set to manage your music, once it is done importing everything, you can delete the folder on the desktop. (You can go into iTunes and do a 'Get Info' on a few songs just to verify that it has copied them into the iTunes Media folder.)

If everything was in the right place when you backed up to TM, you should also be able to simply restore the folder to its default location (unless you changed the iTunes music directory). Move the current iTunes library to the Desktop (for safe keeping for now), open up TM, find the iTunes library (<your user directory>/Music/iTunes) and restore it.

^^^ Wasn't sure if the above would actually restore the iTunes library .itl and .xml files or if you would need to restore those also.

If you restore the whole folder, you should be fine. Whenever I install new versions of OS X (always do a clean install), I just restore the whole iTunes folder and it all works perfectly since everything for the library is contained in that folder.

Many thanks Bobtomay et al. The advice given works perfectly.

Many thanks again