Music.app seems to forget ALL settings, sometimes.

two things:

1. Yes. I see that everything from Apple Music has to be redownloaded even though it is already present. This is part of the problem as I originally described. This is not a feature. It’s a problem.
2. Yes. I know I have to reimport everything. And then it wants to upload everything to the iCloud again. All nearly 1TB. And it reconciles … badly? Incompletely, at best. One time it made a duplicate of literally everything in iCloud. Another time it only duplicated about 20%. Again, this is the nature of the problem as I have originally described.

Music.app resets to factory defaults, and then to fix it I have to use up at least 80% of my monthly internet allotment.

I’d like to not care about reimporting absolutely everything and redownloading and reuploading absolutely everything. I’d like to know where the Music.app keeps all of its settings so I could restore them from Time Machine, at least. Or figure out WHY Music.app loses its settings and stop that.

I read the linked article. None of it seems relevant. I have not recently upgraded to Catalina. This is a new phenomenon since relocating my Music folder to a new location. The move itself went fine. Afterwards, the Music.app started forgetting everything. Not just the local music directory location, but EVERYTHING, like my login and settings and everything. It’s as if a plist somewhere got deleted. But that’s the thing now. I see the new default Music folder is in Library Caches? Or at least the Apple Music downloaded content is? It’s all very confusing and scattered.

Preventing the problem would be great. But how do I get the Music.app to recognize that all 950GB of music it wants to download from the iCloud is already there in its target directory?

It should. But it does not. This is the crux of the problem. It always wants to redownload everything as a * 1.* duplicate.

I will go look for hidden files and stuff to see if I can find any *.musiclibrary package.

OK. This is fun. What is this all?

/Users/me/Library/Caches/com.apple.bird/session/g/99D8C861-F322-4466-A0C3-269289BE33C9/

It is a folder that contains the following files:

Application.musicdb

Library.musicdb

Extras.itdb

Preferences.plist

Genius.itdb

sentinel

Library Preferences.musicdb

I have hidden files set to visible in Finder.

After reimporting everything and downloading a few Apple Music media files, I conducted a complete search of all my storage for "Music Library.musiclibrary"

No such file.

No folder or package called "Music Library" and no .musiclibrary

Getting back to this. I have tried everything and cannot get around this message when I create a new library:

"You cannot change the music library at this time because the current library is in use by a device. Sign in without connected devices to change your music library."

Does this mean I have to log out of Apple Music or iTunes Music Match or iCloud or ... what? I don't know what it means by "Devices" here.

You nailed it. I found these solutions elsewhere after I reviewed all the links you sent. I ended up taking my machine off networking and rebooting. Then I could make an new library (and now I have that .musiclibrary pkg) and the. Following a synthesis of those articles you share and other notes I made a symlink to point the physical storage to my 1TB SD Card. This appears to have solved the problem, but I need a n few weeks of stability before I’ll call it a done deal.

This whole thing is very frustrating. It seems overly complicated for the end user to manage or recovery from problems. I have a long list of things to send as Feedback.

Perhaps I should be using this tactic:

Use multiple libraries in Music on Mac - Apple Support

Also, I don’t see a Music Library.musiclibrary package anywhere. I searched the whole system. Nada.