So yet again iTunes starts up and complains – The file “iTunes Library.itl” does not appear to be a valid music library file. iTunes has attempted to recover your music library and renamed this file to
“iTunes Library (Damaged).itl” blah, blah.

Oh, well I thought, it does this ALL the time, and after 15 mins of disk grinding and thrashing the CPU it rebuilds the library. Ooooohhh no, not this time.

It’s all gone, every sodding MP3 from my library. I think spending all day recreating my library of 5000+ MP3 is a good way to spend my time, and even  after doing all that I’ve still lost all my track ratings and playcounts. thanks Apple for the quality and well tested software that is iTunes.

Why the Apple developers decided it would be a good idea to keep the iTunes library in two places – a binary file (.itl) and a XML file, is beyond me. Just one more thing to go wrong and get out of sync if you ask me (but then I’m not the god like genius that the Apple developers are). BTW, I’m not alone in this problem as a Google search throws up thousands of hits for this problem (no solutions or causes though)