bethanie's Journal: iTunes: I need help.

So, a month ago when my hard drive crashed, it took iTunes along with it.

I was able to recover the data off of that hard drive, though, so the old iTunes is saved in there somewhere, I'm sure.

In the meantime, I had to jump on a plane to California and arrange my dad's funeral. I downloaded iTunes again and used it to burn a CD of the songs my dad wanted played. (I also may have selected a few choice albums for ripping from my mom & dad's CD collection... but you didn't hear me say anything about that.)

Since I got home, have managed to get my library back in order and consolidated and everything -- BUT I lost all my playlists and my ratings, which really really sucks.

Can anyone tell me the files that I would need to transfer over from the iTunes backup to my current folder in order to get the ratings and playlists back? Does such a thing even exist? Or did it die along with the monkeys pushing buttons and hampsters running in the wheels that made iTunes run so automagically?

TIA for your help.

How many playlists and what types?

[arb]

Roughly how many playlists of each type (simple and smart) are you talking about? I could probably pull the information from the iTunes Music Library.xml file for you, but it might take a little while. I've done a little hacking of the music library xml file before and I might be able to get your playlists out relatively intact. If you send me that file I will have a look anyway and let you know what I can make of it.

Import the xml file

[Harris]

iTunes Music Library.xml - stores the playlists, ratings and files (so you might end up with two copies of everything).

From http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/03/itunes.html [xml.com] :

The iTunes library file, a file called iTunes Music Library.xml, is created automatically when you launch iTunes. On Mac OS X, it can be found in the directory $HOME/Music/iTunes/, while on Windows, you'll find it in My Documents\My Music\iTunes\. It's an XML file, the format of which is defined by a Document Type Declaration (DTD) l

Re:Import the xml file

[Otter]

I migrated iTunes data when I installed a new hard drive -- the one problem I had was that the CDDB data (which I think are in a separate but easily identifiable file, not in iTunes Music Library.xml) didn't initially work. When I added a new CD, though, the whole list worked again. Presumably the file wasn't EOF'd correctly, or something like that, but I didn't bother to look closely.

Re:Import the xml file

[Oculus Habent]

For reference, if you aren't booting off the drive with the file on it, look for:
X:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes

Where X is the drive and username is, well, self-explanatory. :)