How to restore a lost iTunes library
January 4, 2009
Too often a hard drive crash or some unforeseen circumstance causes us to lose our library of tunes. This recently happened to my wife Megan, so I had a little project this morning to do what I could to restore it. I thought I’d take a second and share what I found and did. Of course, this assumes that you have no back-up (either a back-up drive or physical media such as CDs). Actually, after a little research it turns out it’s pretty easy.
1. Transfer what you can from your iPod to your new instance of iTunes.
A. Enable your iPod for “manual management of music.” You can do this by installing iTunes and then connecting your iPod. When it asks you, DO NOT tell it to erase and sync your iPod. Hit cancel, then simply click the manual management box when your iPod comes up in iTunes.
B. Download Ephpod. This is a free little utility that allows you to copy music from your iPod to iTunes (iTunes doesn’t allow this itself). Ephpod will ask you to select your iPod hard drive when you fire it up. If you can’t see your iPod hard drive in the list then you need to go back to step A. Now select all of your music displayed in Ephpod and go to File > Copy to Directory. Copy everything into your My Documents > My Music > iTunes directory.
C. Go into iTunes and select File > Import Folder. Then import all of the music you just moved over. You should be good to go. In the case where you have AAC files bought from the iTunes store, you will need to make sure you authorized the new computer to play them.
2. Still not everything? Well, you can send Apple an email and it’s been reported that they will allow you to download all your purchases made through them – but only once.
I did all of this this morning, and I’m still waiting to hear back from Apple. I’ll let you know if that last step works as advertised.
Update: My wife did hear back from Apple the same day that I sent the request, and when she didn’t respond immediately the nice woman from Apple reached out to her again. We were able to download our purchases again, as reported elsewhere. Another great customer experience with Apple. Libary restored. Thank you Apple!
Update 2 (11/16/2009): This continues to be a very popular post, it really seems to be a problem that lots of people have. It looks like since my original post Apple has changed their website and removed the support form I used to reference in Step 2 above when I say “sending an email.” However, now you can arrange a call with an expert by going here, which admittedly is better than submitting a form and waiting for a response. In general, if you find any of my instructions above can be improved or are outdated please make a comment on how to fix the issue faster – around 50 people read these instructions every day so you would really be helping a lot of people.
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June 5, 2009 at 10:00 am
[...] So, I googled “restore lost iTunes library”, and found a link to this blog post: http://dougwick.com/2009/01/04/how-to-restore-a-lost-itunes-library/. This guy has obviously done his research; I didn’t look past this blog post. His [...]
June 5, 2009 at 10:34 am
Doug, I am not sure why I had to pay for Ephpod. After I hit the Download link, it went to a payment screen where you pay $19.95 for a one-year subscription or a one-time fee for $24.95, and I couldn’t go past that until I paid for it. It didn’t appear to download the application until after it processed the payment. Maybe, I didn’t have to do that? I really appreciate your post though. I had no idea where to start with trying to restore my library, but this was EASY!
June 5, 2009 at 11:02 am
Ok, upon further research, it does appear that Ephpod download should be free. I will email and see what I paid for; I probably clicked on the wrong Download link. There are a couple on the Ephpod home page.
June 9, 2009 at 4:19 pm
[...] [DougWick] [...]
November 1, 2009 at 4:11 pm
How ’bout restoring your lost iTunes library on a MAC?
November 3, 2009 at 11:43 am
Hey rj, I’m sorry, I can’t help you there as (gasp) I don’t own one – though I’m a huge iPhone and iPod fan. If you figure that out, would very much appreciate your additions here in the comments (and would be happy to update the blog post). This post gets a lot of traffic, so a lot of people would benefit.
November 12, 2009 at 12:26 pm
I don’t see the form at the bottom on the apple page that you link back to. Can you be more specific about which link on that page gets me to the form? Thanks for your help.
November 16, 2009 at 10:28 am
I would appreciate if you would send me a link to something besides the apple itunes support site. My hard drive crashed and I don’t have the songs on an ipod. Apples site is so confusing and I looked all over and can’t find the page with an actual form(e-mail). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
December 25, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I tried downloading and installing ephpod today on Windows 7. I ran ephpod, it found the ipod, but it wasn’t able to get much further then that because there was some sort of “access violation”. I ended up having to kill ephod from the task manager. that ephpod site was pretty confusing because not only was ephod available, but an assortment of paid utilities as well.
I’ll have to keep digging around to see if I can find a an equivalent free utility to ephpod that isn’t crippled. Thanks for your note because now I know what to do.
January 19, 2010 at 2:50 pm
THanks so much I was about to rip my hair out when all my songs were gone. my hair and i thank you
January 29, 2010 at 6:55 pm
Your webLog is great. I m gonna read all, thanks. Continue doing on it.
February 9, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Great information. Keep up the great work. I love Google.
February 19, 2010 at 10:01 am
Doug,
thanks a lot for the info. Visited Ephpod’s website and it seems the developer suggests CopyTrans (http://www.copytrans.net) as a more viable solution for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Any feedback on that soft?
Cheers.
Carlos
February 22, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Cheers mate…..fuck’n legend!!!
saved my skin
February 23, 2010 at 5:46 am
i don’t really know why but on my husband and my ipods all we had to do to restore our librarys was to plug in our ipods then go to file menu in itunes and click transfer files from the ipod attatched to the computer.
March 2, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Go to file and import the library although you must be able to identify it’s location. If it is missing then you need to re-consolidate all your music. This is unfortunate though as you will likely loose all rating stars etc. That loose data only stores in the Library format and not in the file. Hope this helps someone. I can’t locate mine and have backed it up so many times I can’t find the most recent. I believe iTunes last update screwed it up but I could be wrong.
March 7, 2010 at 11:56 pm
My computer crashed. So i had to get a new system. But when i plugged my ipod in it didnt download itunes. So i did a search for an itunes download. I downloaded it and it worked. But when i tryed the ephpod it would only put 250 songs that were not on my itunes but on my ipod on there. i dont get what to do and how i get it all back.
March 18, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Tried copytrans which i downloaded from the ephpod Site. Choosed only 10 Songs for Testing, and it tells me in The Trial version i am limited to 100 Songs. I am desperate. What can i do?
March 28, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Followed the Ephpod link and downloaded the CopyTrans software. At 19.99$ or £13 it’s worth every penny. I successfully retrieved almost 6000 songs. Thanks Doug.
June 2, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Does this method also restore your artwork and file tags? I have spent a lot of time organizing my mp3′s and would hate to lose that.
June 28, 2010 at 2:35 pm
it costs at least $30 to call the apple support team. Are there any free options? None of their suggestions worked.
July 15, 2010 at 9:21 pm
good
July 16, 2010 at 6:07 pm
This helped for the most part. But I only got back all the songs I paid for . I had 900 songs and only 50 of them were purchased with Itunes. It would be helpful if you could tell me how to get the rest of my libary back. Being that I sat here two days now copying and trying to get the files back but it wouldnt work.