Here’s what happened: In anticipation of running out of storage on my computer, I bought an external hard drive. The first thing I did was move all of my music and video onto it, which included the folder called “iTunes library”.
Then I opened iTunes, and it was completely empty – wiped clean. There was, however, an option to search my computer for music and video, it found everything in the external drive and (whew!) I got it all back. So far so good.
Except that the playlists were deleted. I didn’t have a ton of them; there were separate lists for my iPod and my wife’s, plus a few others. I started recreating the lists by hand, but it’s extremely tedious. There are literally thousands of songs to go through and decide where they belong. There’s gotta be a better way!
I’m not sitting at my Mac so some of this might not be exact, but what you want to do is put the directories containing your playlists back in your home directory ( this might require right-clicking on iTunes Library and selecting “Open Package” to get at the relevant directories), leaving the actual music files on your external drive, then go into the preferences and tell iTunes where you’ve moved the files to.
Actually, if I were you, I’d set everything back the way it was and make sure all your playlists are back in working order and then go in and move just the music files to the external drive. Then you can go back and tell iTunes that they’ve moved. This is the way I set up mine so that the directory where the actual music files is stored can be shared among different users.
I suggest you look at the Apple support for iTunes. It has a procedure for moving the location of your iTunes library and music. What you have done is moved the music and support files, one of which contains the playlists, but not told iTunes where to find all the files. By searching for the music files, you have effectively recreated the library from scratch without the support files. In Windows the library and playlist file is “iTunes Library.itl” I think this link has the info you need.
Okay, so I went to where I’d moved the iTunes folder and opened the “iTunes library” file. All it did was open iTunes in its current configuration – no playlists. I found some files marked “previous versions of iTunes library” and tried those, also to no avail. Of course, it’s entirely possible that I did something wrong or missed a step.
Then I did a system restore to the day before I got the external drive and opened iTunes. No dice either. It looked just like it did before the restore.
So, I took a deep breath and resigned myself to spending much of the evening re-creating the lists manually. Like I said, I didn’t lose any actual content, and I think I’ve got things pretty much back to how they were before. Close enough for rock & roll, anyway. I’m over it, but I still might futz around a bit and try to figure out why I couldn’t make it work.
I can’t help you recover those lost playlists, but you can prevent it from happening again by using smart playlists instead of those regular ones. Go to File>New Smart Playlist and tell it to create a playlist that matches the rule: Comment contains _____. In the blank I usually just put a word describing the playlist (party, mellow, etc.).
Then, instead of dragging each song to the playlist, just write that word in the comment box of the songs you want to appear in the playlist. It’s tedious and time-consuming, but if you have to re-drag them anyway it doesn’t take that much longer, especially when you can choose more than one song or album at once and type in the word. And that way, if this ever happens again, all you’ll have to do is recreate the Smart Playlist, and the songs will transfer automatically because the info in the comment boxes will still be there.
Wait so you have yet to go into iTunes and tell it where you’ve moved your iTunes folder to? That’s what Kiwi Fruit and UncleRojelio have told you to do…not open the library file or anything.
You can also “Export” playlists. Then save the files it creates to a backup disk/drive; if you need to recover a playlist you just drag and drop into iTunes and it should recreate the playlist(s) in entirety.