I went opened Itunes this evening and the whole thing has been wiped clean. All my music, all my playlists -gone.

I was in a rush this morning, Itunes was open, and stupidly I just pressed the off button instead of shutting the computer down properly as it was taking ages to shut down properly, I needed to leave the house quickly and didn't want to leave the computer on especially as it's a laptop.

This evening I turned the computer on, went to Itunes to do something - and all my music's disappeared. Have gone to 'My Music' and looked through all the folders; my WMP tracks are all there and openable, but the files named Itunes won't open and seem all encrypted.

What to do? Is this an irredeemable disaster? Or are all my playlists stored somewhere deep in the bowels of this (Windows, argh) computer?

Has anybody had this happen to them? If so, were you able to find everything again or was it lost forever?

I tried a system restore but it didn't make any difference.

Are you on Mac or PC?

PC - which is probably bad news when it comes to Itunes.

OK, I've done a search for a random track and found it in the bowels of my computer, stored as a Winamp something or other, which is weird as I never use Winamp. I have no idea why they saved themselves there, rather than in an Itunes application. Do you , or does anyone know how to search through Winamp? What I want more than anything else is to get all my Itunes playlists back...

Before you try doing anything else, I would get advice from some repairers. It is more than likely that they could restore the data even if you can't, but you may make it more difficult to do so if you compound the problem by tinkering around with it

We've had two computers at work blow up - literally! One of them was repaired - it just needed a replacement board and the data was intact. The other one had really passed its shelf life and wasn't worth repairing, but the repairers were able to extract the data from the hard drive and put it on a disk for me. So I'd be surprised if they couldn't restore your iTunes.

There's probably an iTunes techy forum on the web somewhere if you do a bit of googling. (I know there is one on the Apple pages, but they probably won't take kindly to a PC user! But you never know: http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa Or they might be able to point you in the right direction for another forum.)

PC is bad news in general, if you ask me...


Have you tried reloading your playlists by going into your music file, then into your itunes library file and opening the default playlist thingy with a right click (asking it to open with iTunes)? If that doesn't work then it appears that the problem is not with iTunes, but with your computer which has eaten all of your music...


Check the recycle bin to make sure that the tunes haven't found their way in there - if they have you can right click to restore them to their original place.

If / when you get your stuff back, try to store all of your music in the iTunes folder, rather than letting iTunes search for it on your PC - in the first case, you will always know where all of it is supposed to be, in the second, iTunes only effectively shows you links to music which could be anywhere, in any folder of your PC.

If these things don't work, try checking out online forums as someone suggested.

Hope it works out for you!

Allan

Hi Allan and everybody - thanks for all suggestions. Can you save playlists in the Itunes folder? The most annoying thing about it is the time it took me painstakingly to copy out the names of hundreds of tracks from 'unknown albums' where track names can't be downloaded. And changing orders of tracks when half the tracks are 'performance' and the other half are 'backing' and you want them together in pairs rather than at opposite ends of the CD... stuff like that. Anyway if all that can be saved in the Itunes folder - titles and playlists - then I needn't get in a panic about it happening again...

OK - I just made a playlist in Itunes, saved it in the Itunes folder of My Music, deleted it in Itunes, wene back to Itunes, located it and opened it in Itunes. Nothing, nada, it didn't appear. So how do you save an Itunes playlist? CAN you save an Itunes playlist? If not, I don't feel like using Itunes any more, not if all your work can be destroyed in one fell swoop as easily as that.

The exact thing happened to me the other day! Devastated and no idea how to fix it..
Hope yours gets sorted out soon

Violinia (and Singing Fiddle) - have chatted to my in-house tech support, who suggests the following ---

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93313

follow the instructions given on this page

Hope it helps!

Thanks so much maggiemay! It didnt get back all the music, but more than half of it has been restored!

my husband lost his itunes on the PC - whole PC died and downloaded a program called i-rip which backed it all up from hi ipod onto the new computer (which is an imac so has a slightly cosier relationship with i tunes)

big lesson is to back up our itunes tho!