Catalina Upgrade has wiped out my iTunes library. Could anyone help?

Latebloomer83Latebloomer83
Posted:
in macOS edited October 2019
After upgrading to Catalina, I noticed the new Music app was running really slow and all my album artwork was missing. The status bar was saying something like "Adding album art" or whatever but it was taking hours and then Music became unresponsive and crashed. Upon rebooting all my Music library had completely disappeared, including playlists. Like starting completely fresh. It must have been interrupted by the app crashing.

All my music is still in the old iTunes media folder but when I tried to copy it back into Music it started trying to move it over and create new duplicate files in the /Music/Media folder, rather than the Music/iTunes Media folder. Catalina seems to use a new media folder as the name iTunes has been dropped essentially.  As I have 1.7 Tb of music on a 3TB fusion drive, there was not enough room to creates duplicates of everything to I cancelled that. Also this would not have recovered my playlists (which have years of curation put into them and are really important to me). There doesn't seem to be an XML file anymore, only the iTunes Library.itl file now. I tried to import that to get my playlists back but Music gives an error saying it's not a valid exported file.

Unfortunately I have not backed up onto my external HD for 6 months (Dumb I know), So I cannot easily regress to pre-Catalina where everything was working beautifully.
All the music is still there in the old iTunes media folder - and there is an .ITL file so my playlists should still be embedded in that if I understand correctly.

What would be the cleanest way to restore everything without losing my playlists or making the situation worse?

Many thanks if anyone can assist!


Luke

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    Latebloomer83Latebloomer83 Posts: 3member
    I kind of solved it but there is still around 150 GB of music missing it seems. The old iTunes Music (*just music, not including Podcasts etc) folder was 1.7 TB whereas Catalina Music app is only showing 1.55TB of Music in total. Not sure how to account for the difference!

    Also I'm not a big fan of dropdown tracklistings disappearing from the Browsing mode. You have to go in to each individual album in grid mode to see what tracks are in it, then backtrack out each time. The older style was way better! I'm tempted to reinstall Mojave in some ways.
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