iTunes 5.0 Special Report: Entire library lost, fix

MacFixIt reader Vinko Tsui is one of the few readers who experienced a loss of his entire music library after updating to iTunes 5.0. This problem is infrequent, though it has occurred with previous iTunes updates, and underscores the importance of backing up your iTunes music library.

Vinko writes:

"I just updated iTunes and after restarting and starting iTunes, all my songs and playlist are gone. It looks like iTunes 5 had created a brand new library for itself.

In other cases, the old Library is simply moved to a different folder, which must be re-added to the iTunes 5.0 library. One reader writes:

"It appears that iTunes 5 have backed up my iTunes 4 Library into a folder called 'Previous iTunes Libraries.' In this folder I found a file 'iTunes Library 2005-9-8.'

"I then navigate to the 'iTunes Music' folder within the ~/Music/iTunes folder. To my surprise, I found many, if not all, my previous music.

"The only way I can find to get my music back into iTunes was to select the "Add to Library..." menu item and choose the "iTunes" folder within my Music folder.

"It appears that I have lost all my previous Playlist and ratings for my songs. This is very disappointing, especially when there did not seem to be a warning about this behavior prior to my upgrade."

Apple has also posted a Knowledge Base article explaining how to recover the library in some cases -- when the library is still existent in the User folder but is not immediately recognized by the new release of iTunes.

The steps are as follows:

1. Quit iTunes.
2. Navigate to ~/Music/iTunes (/Users/username/Music/iTunes/)
3. Drag the iTunes Library file from the above location to the Desktop.
4. Open the Previous iTunes Libraries folder in the iTunes folder.
5. Locate the file named iTunes Library YYYY-MM-DD where YYYY-MM-DD is the date you first opened iTunes 5 (Year-Month-Day).
6. Drag this file to the iTunes folder (the enclosing folder).
7. Rename this file to iTunes Library.
8. Open iTunes.

If you were affected by this variant of the problem, your music should now appear normally in the iTunes 5.0 window.

Index:

• Release Notes
• iTunes 5.0.1 coming with several bug fixes
• Album art not displayed, solutions
• Disc burning issues: Drives not recognized, more
• New interface design complaints
• iPod mini problems
• iPod not recognized
• iTunes encoded tracks not playing correctly in other applications
• Jumping from song to song erratically
• Entire library lost, fix
• Make sure your iApps are updated
• Sharing not working; fix
• Persistent "Quit iTunes before installing" message, fix
• Podcasts lost
• Purchased music playlist lost
• Reverting (downgrading) to iTunes 4.9
• Some music (particularly purchased tracks) not transferring to iPod
• Playback problems
• Tracks demanding re-authorization
• Improvements

Resources