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Hierarchy of iTunes and Beatunes syncing, fairly urgent..

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Matt Knowles

18 Sep, 2013 10:32 PM

Hello the lovely people of Beatunes i have a question for you that may or may not make my evening...

Long story short, i am having to rebuild my itunes library again after some issues with the itl file updating and overwriting itself with a newer - very lacking version of my library. I still have all the media so all is not lost but i had HUNDREDS of playlists in iTunes for all kinds of things, like stuff i needed for work, djing, sampling, ableton stuff, my nan? you name it, bloody loads of them!

Now i realise that these will all be gone once my music has been put back into my itunes library but ive just opened Beatunes and found that all my playlists are still there! YES! But..

My question is what is the best way, or rather is there a way to make Beatunes sync itself to itunes before itunes syncs to it, or will it do that automatically? Or is there a way to stop it from synchronising with itunes and export the playlists to throw back into itunes?

Ive had a look at the playlists exporter and am just concerned about whether Beatunes will synchronise itself with my new playlistless library and ill lose them from there too before i get the chance to export them all! Does that make sense?

Hope someone can help me out!

x

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 19 Sep, 2013 08:03 AM

   

   Hi Matt,

   first of all, look for your iTunes Music Library.xml or iTunes Library.xml file. It should be somewhere in your music folder (depends on operating system). If you haven't re-installed iTunes yet, it still contains all your playlists. You might want to make a copy of that file—or perhaps you have a copy of that in your Time Machine backup (if you use Time Machine, that is).

   Because that's basically the file beaTunes reads, when importing data from iTunes. It is overwritten by iTunes whenever you change something in iTunes.

   Anyhow. Assuming you have beaTunes running and it hasn't synced with iTunes yet, you have to prevent that from happening. To do so, you have to somehow reach the beaTunes preferences and deactivate Sync on Window change. Because basically what beaTunes does when it claims it is syncing, is reading the iTunes library from iTunes Library.xml and adjusting its own data to match the iTunes file (this includes deleting tracks from its own database).

   If you managed to disable automatic syncing, exporting individual playlist via right-click on a playlists and then choosing M3U8 as format (iTunes can import it).
   You may also try to enable Automatically export playlists from the beaTunes General preferences. All playlists are dumped to something like ~/Music/beaTunes/XXLibrary/Playlists—but it may take a while.

   Well. I hope this helps somehow. Please let me know, whether you were able to restore your lists.

   Thank you,

   -hendrik

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