"Your iTunes Music Library is Corrupt – attempting to rebuild"

This is the warning message that sent me to the verge of panic last week. It wasn’t the fact I was potentially losing all of my music (of course it is all legal and backed up on discs sitting at the ready) but that sobering fact that iTunes links my phone, contacts, apps, movies, etc. If this all just went to hell in a hand basket (of viral code) how was I going to fix everything?

To top it off, my iMac decided to permanently cycle through Indexing my files so I couldn’t search for any files (kind of a big problem for me).

Three days of work and 3 libraries rebuilt and eventually all 3 corrupted themselves. The joys of turning to message boards and not always finding the best solution forced me to just figure it out. I managed to copy, delete, and reinstall files eventually getting things back to functioning order (a public nod to my inner geek).

In the end it all worked out, I’m more savvy with fixing my Mac (felt like I was back on a PC for a while). An unexpected surprise would be that my genius playlists changed (see pic above) but that came at the cost of losing all of my other playlists, song counts, AND ratings. Honestly, how am I expected to rebuild lists that have taken years to compile?

The glass is half full: Now I get to start from scratch and rediscover my music collection. It’s fun to flip through album art that I never paid attention to before. My iTunes fix also cured my infinite indexing problem.

Halle-freakin-lujah. The end.