itunes help please

[harleyd]

opened itunes this morning and approx 500 songs are missing, my playlists have disappeared too

if i plug my ipod in can i sync them back onto itunes, or am i going to lose them off the ipod

tia

anybody?

hi, I am no expert with the ipod, bur once I deleted a few songs from my hard drive and when I plugged in the ipod, iTunes asked me whether I wanted to copy those missing songs from the ipod back into my playlists.
Whatever you do, make sure iTunes is configured to NOT SYNC iPod automatically after plugging it in, just in case. (Preferences > syncing > disable automatic syncing)

If you can find out where itunes stores music on your hard drive it might just be worth checking whether it's still there, or has been moved, or even checking the recycle bin... Just in case. As if the music's there somewhere it might be possible to get it back on itunes.

oh thank you, i didnt know you could disable the automatic syncing, have now done that

i have managed to save the official downloads back onto my library, have lost the less officially downloaded ones
and i can rip ones back on from cd's

the cable you get ius usually just a one way one. ie you can get tunes FROM your PC but not TO it. try using your computers search to see if the files are still there somewhere. DO NOT SYNC YOUR IPOD!!!! That means that whatever is in your itunes will be copied to your ipod, meaning any missing tunes would not be on there

good luck
I find iTunes unnecesarily complicated...