“Hi, I accidentally erased songs from my iTunes thinking that there is backup. But later I realized that, in the backup folder none of these deleted tracks were present. Now, are my deleted music tracks gone forever? Or can I restore it back by any means? Please guide me on what should be done now?"
ITunes is an amazing media player that even saves all your music tracks, videos, pictures, podcasts, etc. in separate folders under iTunes Library folder on Mac. While navigating through iTunes on a Mac system user may intentionally or accidentally delete audio tracks from it and suffer file loss. Various scenarios of deleting music tracks from iTunes can be as follow.
- While trying to delete unwanted songs from iTunes, users may unintentionally select necessary files and delete it
- Updating iTunes from older version to latest version may sometimes seek permission before erasing files from iTunes. In such instance, accidentally clicking yes will wipe all audio tracks along with other iTunes files from its library
- While trying to move or drag some hundreds of selected audio tracks from iTunes library to other location, deletion of those audios due to unknown software conflicts or iTunes crashing
In these situations one may incur great loss of iTunes music that seems to be very important. However, if any music tracks or playlist is accidentally deleted from iTunes on Mac and if Trash is empty, there is one possible way to restore such files back.
Go to Home folder after quitting iTunes -> select Music folder -> and browse for iTunes folder -> Here find a file with the name, iTunes Music Library.xml -> Drag this file from this location to other convenient location like desktop. Now delete iTunes Library.itl file and re-open iTunes -> go to File menu -> click for Library -> select Import Playlists -> select iTunes Music Library.xml that you saved on desktop previously. This should magically work to get back music that was mistakenly or intentionally deleted from iTunes. If this cannot fetch you accidentally erased songs from iTunes then make use of reliable recovery tool.
Software to regain accidentally deleted iTunes music:
With the implementation of Yodot Mac Photo Recovery tool it is possible to get back iTunes music after accidental deletion on Mac OS X. This utility can bring back various music file tracks with AMR, AIFF, MP3, WAV, MIDI, WMA, ALAC, etc. file extensions. Along with music files, this tool can extract iTunes photos, videos, Podcasts, TV shows, and other media files from iTunes Library on Macintosh machine. It can even support recovery of iTunes files after iTunes database error, file cannot be saved in library error, hard drive failure, iTunes library corruption and many others on Mac. Apart from iTunes, this tool can bring back all media files from iPod, external hard drive, memory cards, USB flash drive and others with ease. One can utilize this tool to get back media files on Macintosh computers running with Mavericks, Lion, Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard and Leopard OS X versions.
Steps to get back accidentally deleted music from iTunes:
- Download Yodot Mac Photo Recovery software on your Mac computer and install it
- Run the utility and click on ‘Deleted Photo Recovery’ option
- Choose the volume from Mac hard drive that saves all iTunes library files
- Select 'Music and Video' as file type
- All retrievable music and video files will be displayed on screen
- Opt ‘Data View' or 'File Type View’ to glance at recovered music files from the list
- Then save necessary restored songs to a new destination location on Mac hard drive (Not on source location)
Precautionary Note:
- Avoid accidental deletion of music tracks from iTunes library
- While moving files from/to iTunes library follow careful steps
- Enable Time Machine to deal with any kind of file loss on Mac
