[saranwarp]

Sorry if someone's talked about this already...

My library disappeared, or something like that. I have about 7000 songs, but only 1200 of them showed up when I opened iTunes up for the first time in a couple days. In my iTunes folder there are now two additional files: one called "iTunes 4 Music Library (Damaged)", which is 10.3 MB, "iTunes 4 Music Library (Old)", which is 10.1 MB, as well as the normal iTunes Music Library, which was 1.5 MB. (I ended up re-adding the rest of my songs to the new library, which has since bumped that file up to 8.7 MB.) Trying to open the Damaged library doesn't do anything; opening the Old library just brings me to the new one. It sucks because now all my playlists are gone and all the star ratings and play counts of those unlucky 5500 songs are gone. Not life-damaging things, of course, but still very annoying.

The good news is that everything is backed up on my 40 GB iPod. Is there a way for me to basically erase iTunes on my computer and have all the songs AND settings (star ratings, play count) sync back from the iPod? More generally, what happened that would have damaged my library file?

[yukon]

iTunes uses what's apparently a very impressive database type system. Unfortunatly, it can get corrupted....possibly due to the new version (judging by the "old" library copy), or maybe you force quit iTunes the last time?

Playlists aren't a big deal, but the playcounts and ratings kind of are, I've lost those before. I don't use either much anymore except the ratings lately as I haven't had problems for a long time. A few months ago, I deleted all iTunes prefs and just added all my music again, that could be a reason why things are more stable....not sure.

The ratings and playcounts, I'm surprised there's no ID3 tag for it (though it would be annoying in P2P distribution). Not sure if there's anything I can suggest....iTunes seems to be handling this corruption better at least, when I had the problem, iTunes would just refuse to launch (there's probably a thread with my post in it here somewhere).

[saranwarp]

I bet star ratings and play count are kept in that DATA file.

Anyway, the big issue is getting some 2000 star ratings stuck on my iPod back over to my computer. I have a feeling there's no easy way to do that, though...