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Recto Bold · Jun 17, 2005, 03:56 AM

This is somewhat embarassing; I've been a Mac user for years but can't seem to nail this. I recently did a full clean install of 10.4 for various reasons. I backed up my entire HD and everything went back no problem. My iTunes folder is on an external FW drive and it took quite a bit of messing around to get iTunes to recognise the library, despite setting it's external location in the preferences. In fact, in the end I needed to re-import the whole library (no great problem but somewhat annoying). The main issue is that I lost all of my playlists. So, the question is - For the future, where are the playlists stored? I did spotlight searches for them and could not find them, and they appear to not be in my iTunes folder. The preferences for iTunes, which I kept from my previous install held no clue and I'm totally foxed by this whole thing. The playlists are too large to back up to my iDisk with "Back-Up" and since I don't know where they are located, I can't set Back Up to copy them to my external FW drive when I do my dailys. Can anyone help?

Thanks

Hal Itosis · 06:00 PM

/Users/~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml
and
/Users/~/Music/iTunes/iTunes 4 Music Library

Recto Bold · Jun 18, 2005, 03:12 AM

Thanks. That makes it weirder as neither of those files were deleted or changed, since I backed them up before my clean install and then dropped them in to the new system.

Big Mac · Jun 18, 2005, 06:21 AM

You said you had a lot of trouble getting iTunes to recognize the library and that you eventually reimported all of the songs. The library is what stores the playlists, so if you can't get the library to functin you'll have no playlists.

Hal Itosis · Jun 18, 2005, 11:58 PM

Originally Posted by Recto Bold

Thanks. That makes it weirder as neither of those files were deleted or changed, since I backed them up before my clean install and then dropped them in to the new system.

Do the permissions on them look right?

Disk Utility doesn't enter a user's "Home"
to repair any permissions. If / when such
a thing becomes necessary... it must be
done manually by us (using Finder's Get
Info, or Terminal, or BatChmod, etc.).