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so yesterday i finally caved in and upgraded itunes. it was a terrible mistake. it is awful. so i went to computer restore, and restored my computer to around a week ago. i figured this would also put my itunes back to the way it was. i should have factored in that this program was developed by apple, meaning it was bound to not work well. now when i open my itunes, an error message comes up saying "new itunes libary". how do i fix this and keep my music?
i am running windows 7 and yes, i saw after all of this happened that there is an option to revert back to a previous version of itunes and am still kicking myself for not looking at that first.
You should try to get used to the new iTunes.
Generally when people say they want to go back to a previous version, its because they don't do well in general with change in life. That's fine too.
But at some point the old itunes is going to get security risks, performance problems and so on. And guess what? Apple has already stopped updating it. So you're working with dead software now. Not to mention if you upgrade or buy a new computer, you're not going to get the old one anymore.
So take a deep breath and take the 5 minutes that it takes to learn the new iTunes. It's faster, and has some interesting features too.
Yeah I liked the old one myself, the first couple of days I could not find anything... but after a few tries I came to like the new interface. Especially the ability to queue up music for the entire day, iTunes match and so forth.
To answer your question though.... I would:
Backup the music library first
Rinstall the new version of iTunes. It should correctly work with the music library and then you can re-enable some of the features you liked in the old version.
To go backwards, you would have to move the music library to a new folder (eg iTunes-Backup or something like that)
Then have the old ITunes search the drive for the music files themselves (Import to Library feature) and create a new iTunes database.
Close itunes then make a copy of the iTunes music folder to somewhere else. You don't need to open iTunes to do that. Just use windows explorer.
How do I back it up? I cant open itunes at all