Music app not accessing files on local drive (most playing from Cloud only)

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Level 1

23 points

Music app not accessing files on local drive (most playing from Cloud only)

I have a very large music library (166 GB, 20K+ songs) on my iMac (M1 silicon, 2 TB storage, running Sonoma 14.6.1). The songs on my hard drive have been sourced over the years from early iTunes purchases, Amazon Music purchases, ripped from CDs, ripped from vinyl, and several free/legal download sources of MP3/MP4 songs. Please note that I subscribe to iTunes Match, mainly as a back-up (even though I have an external Time Machine SSD) and to access all my songs from other Apple devices.

When I was working with my Music library in iMovie, I noticed that only a very small subset of songs (a couple hundred) showed up in the Music Media pane. This caused me to do some investigating to understand why. I found out that the file location of most of my Music songs were indicated as "Cloud" even though the local library on my iMac internal drive contains the songs. The Music app seems to be accessing the matched cloud versions of almost all my songs instead of the local files. When I click on Info for most songs and look under File it says the location is Cloud.

In looking at the Cloud Status column in Music, most of the songs show up as "Matched," with some showing up as "Purchased," "Uploaded," and a very few were marked, "Removed" or "Duplicate" but they still play.

Is this jumbled library somehow due to my iTunes Match subscription? How do I get Apple Music on my iMac to reconnect to all the local files WITHOUT making duplicates? (I tried re-adding an album manually (by both clicking on the download arrow and by re-importing songs from a CD) and it just duplicated the song files.

When I go to Music settings and look at the library location it says it's under Music/Music/Media/Music and that's where all the music files ARE but the Music app is not connecting to all of them.

How do I "re-point" the Music app away from the cloud location and to the file locations on my iMac drive?

iMac 24″, macOS 14.6

Posted on Sep 7, 2024 11:33 AM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

274,119 points

Sep 30, 2024 12:00 PM in response to Norway 4

Sorry I didn't see your post at the time. The advice in Empty/corrupt iTunes/Music library after upgrade/crash - Apple Community might have helped you restore/rebuild the library more efficiently. Make sure to backup your library database in future such that it could be easily restored if this happens again. Time Machine is generally quite effective.

tt2

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Answer 2

Norway 4 Author

Level 1

23 points

Sep 30, 2024 11:46 AM in response to Norway 4

I had several discussions with Apple Support, but we eventually got my issue fixed. It took a lot of time and effort, but here's what we ended up doing...

First, we went to Finder and made a copy of my database of songs (Music > Music > Media > Music) on an external SSD drive. We then deleted my entire Music library. Since I have the iTunes Match service (that costs about $25/year), we were able to re-import all songs from iTunes Match. Since I have over 20,000 songs, this took several hours. To kick off the back-up restore process, I was instructed to hold down CMD while starting Music. This way I could build a new library from scratch.

After the library was restored from iTunes Match, we went to File > Library > Get Album Artwork to try and repopulate all that art. Once that process finished, we were able to create a txt file of the 104 albums for which Apple Music could not identify artwork. I will have to look at each of those albums and manually apply the artwork.

The crazy thing was that they were unable to find album artwork for quite a few mainstream albums like Steely Dan Can't Buy A Thrill (and Aja and Pretzel Logic), Sheryl Crow The Globe Sessions, Bob Dylan Greatest Hits, Peter Frampton Frampton Comes Alive, just to name a few.

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