Restoring deleted playlists in Apple iTunes on iMac

I deleted some playlists from my Apple iTunes on my iMac, but i think I messed it up. What is the easiest way to restore it to the way it was before?


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iMac 27″, macOS 11.7

Posted on Jan 18, 2025 8:45 PM

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Posted on Jan 19, 2025 4:04 AM

With macOS 11.7 you should be running Big Sur, which uses Apple Music rather than iTunes. Do you have Time Machine set up? If not look inside the ~/Music/Music/Previous Music Libraries folder. How old is the most recent file in there? It may hold the previous state of your library the last time that Music got updated in a way that changed the database significantly. You could either restore that version of the .musiclibrary package, or temporarily connect to it, export the playlists that you want to recover, then reconnect to the current library and import the exported lists. If you have a subscription to either Apple Music or iTunes Match then you should take your computer offline before attempting to connect to an older library to export playlists, else the library will update automatically and show the current state of the library in the cloud, including those recent changes that you are trying to reverse.


tt2

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Question marked as ⚠️ Top-ranking reply

Jan 19, 2025 4:04 AM in response to burdell2

With macOS 11.7 you should be running Big Sur, which uses Apple Music rather than iTunes. Do you have Time Machine set up? If not look inside the ~/Music/Music/Previous Music Libraries folder. How old is the most recent file in there? It may hold the previous state of your library the last time that Music got updated in a way that changed the database significantly. You could either restore that version of the .musiclibrary package, or temporarily connect to it, export the playlists that you want to recover, then reconnect to the current library and import the exported lists. If you have a subscription to either Apple Music or iTunes Match then you should take your computer offline before attempting to connect to an older library to export playlists, else the library will update automatically and show the current state of the library in the cloud, including those recent changes that you are trying to reverse.


tt2

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Restoring deleted playlists in Apple iTunes on iMac

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