This might be handy for anyone who experiences what I’ve just been through.

My iTunes library is stored on a shared disk (networked via an Airport Extreme base station) which works nicely.

However, after trying to import a troublesome CD my machine refused to play any music purchased through iTunes Music Store and then, to cap it all, decided to restart with NO MUSIC in the library.

This is a tad disconcerting but luckily easy to fix. Before you do anything BACKUP YOUR ITUNES FOLDER. Yeah, yeah I know – just don’t come crying to me when it all goes wrong!

First the missing library problem.

• Quit iTunes.
• Open your iTunes folder and inside should be several ‘Temp File n’ (where n is a number). These are backups of your iTunes library.
• Chances are your ‘iTunes Library’ and ‘iTunes Music Library.xml’ files are very small, but the most recent ‘Temp File’ is much bigger.

• Delete (really!) both ‘iTunes Library’ and ‘iTunes Music Library.xml’ and rename the most recent large ‘Temp File’ to ‘iTunes Library’.

  That should fix the missing library. You can also save some space and delete all the old temp files once your library is working again.

  Next I had to solve the authorisation error.

  After a bit of Googling it turns out Apple provide a help doc for this. Although they say it’s only for iTunes 4 and 5 I can vouch it works just fine on iTunes 7 too.

  Run Terminal app and enter the following command line instructions:

  sudo mkdir -p /Users/Shared
  sudo chmod 777 /Users/Shared

  That should allow your machine to store it’s authorisation stuff properly again.

  Restart iTunes and you should be good to go.

  See, Macs do f*ck up!

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