Help! windows updated...playlists deleted

Question

my windows did an automatic update and automatically restarted. when i opened up itunes again, all my music and playlists were gone. i had my music backed up in my files so i imported the files back into my library but my playlists are still gone and my playcounts are back to zero!!
anyone else expirienced this?? anyone know what to do??
~thanks!
  Windows XP  

Answer 1

Hi, trelease.
Not quite sure what happened other than something affected your iTunes Library files - default location C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\My Documents\My Music\iTunes - which in addition to telling iTunes where the song files are located also contain playlist and related information.
We have seen a number of posts reporting this problem lately but unfortunately no one has figured out exactly what the reason for this behavior is.
If you don't have a back-up copy of the iTunes library files, and have put them in the same location as they were before iTunes lost track of them, you will have to make use of this article in the Apple Knowledge Base.
Note that this method will restore your iTunes Library to the state it was in on the date of the most recent .itl file in the Previous iTunes Libraries folder. But any changes made since then (eg. songs/playlists added or changes in playcounts or comments), will not be included in the restoration.
A few points to pay close attention to if you follow this method:
Step 1: Quit iTunes and, to err on the side of caution, wait one minute before proceeding.
Step 4: you are dragging the iTunes Library.itl file - you can leave iTunes Music Library.xml alone.
Step 8: you will be renaming the file iTunes Library yyyy-mm-dd.itl to iTunes Library.itl.
And one final point: If you've use this method to restore your library, make sure you create a new back-up copy of the .itl file so you're all set to repeat the procedure if the library ever disappears again.