Recovering Playlists from Backups

[ca$hout]

Moved to Big Sur and everything was fine apart from all my playlists are now gone. Anyone know of a way to manually extract playlists from a backup?

I just want to extract the playlists that i spent years curating.

Luckily the backup from time machine is from October

 

[mikzn]

I am assuming the Back up was an iTunes library?

Did you try importing the iTunes library complete? ( find the file in Music < iTunes = iTunes Library.itl)

Then in Big Sur Music APP - You can hold down the option key while opening the “music app” and you should get a dialogue that asks you to “choose a library” then navigate to the iTunes library (on your back up?) double click to open/import and it should Create a new “music library” and import all the playlists, play counts and lyrics

If the drive is not connected to your Big Sur mac - you can copy the iTunes Library.itl with a pen drive etc and put on on you desk top and do the same - after the import you can trash the iTunes file on the desktop

 

[ca$hout]

yeah I manually copied the iTunes .itl file and the xml file as well and have saved it on my desktop.

If I'm to use to hold down the option key and import the backup library and then export the playlists via that method, once I'm finished will it revert to the current library file?

 

[mikzn]

No it should create a new music library and a new music folder ("Music 1" vs Music) ?

that way both are still there and you can delete one later - and you can move back and forth by using the Option Key to "Choose Library"