Restore Music library from Time Machine

I switched from an Apple Music Student subscription to an Apple Music Voice subscription. After the month ended, I once again got Apple Music Student, but I noticed all my playlists and songs were gone.

I reached out for support and noticed that my Mac still had the playlists and songs saved.

Now this weird thing happens when I try to add playlists, back, only songs I’ve previously added show up on my phone, and the mac is stuck in stream-only mode.

not sure how to reconcile my mac library with my phone but it’s caused me to restore my mac once already after turning on and off sync with cloud library.

The normal location for the Music library is ~/Music/Music where ~ is your user's home folder. You would typically browse to this path, enter Time Machine, and restore the entire folder. If you only overwrote the database it will be more efficient to restore the package ~/Music/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary.

tt2

This didn't work. I sync with Apple Music and tried to overwrite the folder, (12 gbs) but it glitched out, took another backup, and only restores 7 gb from the same backup. now I'm wondering if I should fully restore my Mac from an earlier date.

Earlier backups don't change Apple Music's mind about what should be there.

Ah, I don't think you mentioned having an Apple Music subscription. You cannot restore the library in the cloud by restoring the local library, it will just get updated to the cloud version again. You should turn off Sync Library first, then restore the backup, then turn on Sync Library again. Any Apple Music content that you had added to your library, but removed in error, is still going to get removed when the library is updated from the cloud, but locally stored media and playlists should be merged back into the cloud library.

tt2