I have a problem for which I have been unable to find a solution.
I recently had to replace my Mac, and ended up having to re-import and recreate my Music library. (I had previously been using iTunes; I hadn’t updated for quite a while.)
I have several playlists on my iPad that I would like to have back in Music in the new library. Recreating them manually would be possible but rather difficult.
Does anyone know how I might be able to export the playlist (that exists now only on the iPad) and import it back in to Music?
I’ve looked extensively online and not found a solution, so perhaps it is not possible, but before giving up I wanted to ask here.
I may be mistaken, but if the playlists are in the Music app on the iPad (as opposed to being in some third-party player only), they should copy over automatically when you sync music with your Mac via the Finder, if the same tracks are present.
I’ve had a number of times when I modified a playlist on my Mac, synced it to my iPhone or iPad, and had it sync back the unmodified version of the playlist from the device, resulting in two different playlists with identical names (one with a “1” appended)—which is not the desired behavior (I want it to simply update the playlist on the device), but that’s how it seems to work for me.
However, I don’t know whether having had to re-import the tracks may have changed anything that Music uses to uniquely identify tracks in playlists.
If the iPad is already paired with the Mac for syncing, then yes. But if not (maybe it was previously synchronized with a different computer that is no longer available), enabling syncing will wipe all Music content from the iPad, replacing it with content from the Mac.
I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to reply.
I tried Mr. Miller’s iMazing suggestion, and that will export the music in the playlist, but not the playlist itself, unless I’m doing something wrong.
Mr. McKean and David C. are both correct too. Unfortunately I am in the situation David C. describes.
It looks like I’ll just have to recreate the playlists. Annoying, but hardly a disaster.