iTunes Library is completely blank! How do I restore?

I booted up iTunes today and it's completely blank. It was working fine yesterday but now none of my music or playlists are showing up.

All of my music is on an external drive and that is still there, so it leads me to believe something happened to the xml file or something.

How can I fix this? I am running Leopard and have Time Machine so I should be able to recover any files that are now corrupt.

Have you tried launching iTunes holding the option key down If your library is on an external disk you can point to it from the splash screen you will see pop up

Spaceboy88 said:

I booted up iTunes today and it's completely blank. It was working fine yesterday but now none of my music or playlists are showing up.

All of my music is on an external drive and that is still there, so it leads me to believe something happened to the xml file or something.

How can I fix this? I am running Leopard and have Time Machine so I should be able to recover any files that are now corrupt.

Click to expand...

Did a message pop up saying "Renaming Library to Damaged" or something? I had a problem with that and later found out my HD was failing. It's a good thing you're backing up though ;D

What does the S.M.A.R.T. Status say in Disk Utility?

I had no message at all. I just started it up and it was blank; songs, playlists...everything gone and iTunes reverted back to its original state.

The same thing happened to my wife shortly after upgrading to 10.5.

You can just rebuild your library by re-adding all of the music files to it.

have you opened up your music folder to see if your itunes folder is still in there?

I'm having a somewhat similar problem. I had to have my HD replaced. I have all my files backed up (twice, on two separate external drives). I thought I had restored my music files, b/c all the names and folders showed up in itunes. However when I went to play them, I got "file not found". I tried following the restore directions on the Apple website, but the result was the all the music was now gone out of my itunes library. Not too helpful, LOL!

Baggs - how do you "just re-add" the music...?

This the error message I get. When I look in finder, in music>itunes , I can see all the music by title, Just not directly in itunes!

I know the music is available b/c if I click on a song in finder, it opens itunes and starts playing it.

Okay, I think I fixed it. I did it all in finder.

I copied 3 different types of files and folders from my back-up/external files to my HD. I did it by opening 2 finder windows side by side. You can do this in finder by clicking File> New finder window. Then I found my itunes folder on my back up source in one finder window and on my HD in the other finder window.

From the back up source I copied and replaced the following into the itunes folder on my HD.

1. itunes Library
2. itunes Music (it's a folder) this seems to be where your music actually is
3. itunes music Library.xml

One problem I had was that when I copied the music folder (#2 above) it made a folder in the folder and itunes couldn't find it. It should look exactly like the attached screen shot. Once I dragged the albums directly into the itunes music folder, it worked! Hurray!

free bonus: you get to judge my music. hehehe

I hope that helps, it's rare that I figure something out myself, lol!