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General discussion

Restore iTunes Playlist from External HD

by robstyles21 Feb 13, 2011 11:41AM PST

I recently lost my iMac G5 to a failed HD but fortunately anything of importance was backed up via Time Machine. This included my music which was all stored on the external as it was the actual media location from which iTunes would read from. I've since tried plugging in the external to my Macbook thinking that when I would open iTunes it would be exactly what I had on the iMac - to my dismay that was not the case. While about 95% of the music was intact NONE of my playlists were there. Is there anyway to restore these missing playlists? There was one list in particular that I had been working on for a year to give to my wife for Valentine's Day and I did not keep a hard copy of the titles, restoring the list would be my only hope. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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All the playlist data is stored in iTunes app,

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Feb 13, 2011 8:57PM PST

and the user library which is on the internal HD, regardless of where the actual music files are.

When you plugged in the MacBook, none of that information was available to iTunes.

Will you be getting the iMac G5 hard drive replaced? If so, then the first thing you do when you turn it on is to do a Restore from your Time Machine backup.
This will replace all the information that you are currently missing.

Once that is done, you can look into moving the iTunes information over to the MacBook

P

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