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Why does iTunes refuse to play MY songs that were uploaded from CD long ago?

I've got over 3000 songs in my library and at least half were uploaded from CD. Everything was fine until I got the new iMac and started it up like a new machine because I didn't want the garbage on the old one transferring.

iTunes wants me to buy them again from the iTune store to be able to play them. This is crap. I'm not spending a thousand + dollars because some fool decided to mess with the iTunes coding to make some folks even richer. I don't want to sign up and pay for streaming to listen to music I already own.

I really miss the original iTunes where you could find everything in one place and you could create playlists as well as shuffle within an album, playlist, or all music.

iMac 27″, macOS 14.3

Posted on Apr 8, 2024 3:04 PM

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Posted on Apr 22, 2024 11:05 AM

My music is no longer playing in Apple Music.

Nothing wrong with the music as I can play it fine through VLC player, just Apple Music.

I'm running Sonoma 14.4.1 (23E224) so with Apple Music version 1.4.4.48


My Music Library is stored in my Onedrive. All downloaded to my local iMac. When I select one to play it won't play. If I select play for any song it just continuously pulls a random song from that playlist or album into the playing bar at the top but nothing plays.


If I go to the song file and double click it, then it opens and plays in Apple Music.

I have 24,000 songs so I can't go through and select them one at a time.


Does anyone have any ideas how to resolve?

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15 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Apr 22, 2024 11:05 AM in response to tismeinaz1

My music is no longer playing in Apple Music.

Nothing wrong with the music as I can play it fine through VLC player, just Apple Music.

I'm running Sonoma 14.4.1 (23E224) so with Apple Music version 1.4.4.48


My Music Library is stored in my Onedrive. All downloaded to my local iMac. When I select one to play it won't play. If I select play for any song it just continuously pulls a random song from that playlist or album into the playing bar at the top but nothing plays.


If I go to the song file and double click it, then it opens and plays in Apple Music.

I have 24,000 songs so I can't go through and select them one at a time.


Does anyone have any ideas how to resolve?

Apr 9, 2024 1:58 PM in response to tismeinaz1

Update: It appears the issue is with songs purchased on the iPhone will play on the iPhone but not the iMac or MacBook. I am not going to pay $11 a month plus tax to sync automatically the one or two times I buy a song on the phone. I tried syncing by connection but it won't because it says I don't have enough space on the iMac (mind you it's new and has 638 GB open and it says it's only 2.57 short and the phone only has 68 on it). It won't let me sync just music and keeps telling me it can't sync something that I don't know what it's talking about. This is sooooo frustrating. It used to be so easy. Literally plug and play and now it's as bad as any PC out there.

Apr 22, 2024 12:20 PM in response to Dchantry

I do know that iTunes won’t work for libraries not stored on the Mac, but since yours is -

  1. make sure the Mac is authorized.
  2. Make sure you signed in to iTunes/Apple Music with the UserID you purchased the music with. If you have multiple user IDs, you will need to authorize each one. This turned out to be my issue. Apparently the songs that weren’t playing were purchased early on when I had iTunes on a pc before buying my iMac and getting a .mac user id. So long ago, I didn’t remember.

Apr 9, 2024 2:03 AM in response to tismeinaz1

I have had a very similar problem. On another similar help trail I saw a suggestion as follows: (1) doubleclick on a song to get some options, then (2) show in finder. If you doubleclick on it in finder I have found it will now play OK. Now, you have 3000 songs, so doing it one at a time probably doesn't sound very attractive. However, many of these are very probably lifted from the same albums and reside in the same audio folder. So when you doubleclick on one and show in finder, you may often find twenty or more songs in the same folder. Select them all and right-click to open. They should now all play. People who are tech-savvy can probably extrapolate from this idea of multiple-opening for one album/compilation and make it a one-off change for your whole library. But for now, I'm going through all my playlists and most-played. I'm pretty sure I'll get to 90%+ fairly quickly. Meanwhile I blame Apple for this bug, which seems to be related to new Sonoma upgrades. Good luck.

Apr 9, 2024 10:39 AM in response to NigelBN1

That didn’t work for me, but it was a good try.

However, the update his morning and the resulting restart may have fixed some of it. Suddenly music that was erroring is now playing. Still some that won’t and thinking those may be songs or albums I purchased and downloaded from Amazon because that was the only place they were available or I had credits to use. Going to go to my Amazon Digital purchases and check just those out before clicking on everything one by one to see if it works.

Apr 13, 2024 11:05 AM in response to tismeinaz1

Update: started going through songs and it is a combo of songs/albums I bought and the free ones that iTunes gave away but not all of them. Go figure. Ended up contacting support. Chat bumped me up to higher tech chat who bumped me up to a call and they had to submit to the engineers because I shouldn't be getting the authorize computer message for music I own. I had provided a screen print of the iTunes Store showing my only option was to play a song (not purchase it) with the pop up that I'm not authorized. I mentioned that I'm not the only one having this issue as I have seen plenty of posts on the topic.

Jun 10, 2024 12:56 PM in response to muguy

My old iMac model 11.2 cannot be powered off anymore as it will not restart. I compressed my itunes file version 12.8.3 cannot be transfered or played on my new iMac music. It contains my entire music library. What are my options? These do not include any purchased music, the entire library is form my CD collection.

Thank you.

Jun 12, 2024 5:25 PM in response to tismeinaz1

I compressed the iTunes file from my old iMac, then placed it on the desktop of my new iMac but there, but from there I don't know how to import them to my Music folder on the new iMac. When I click on the iTunes file it says "you can't use this version of the application "iTunes" with this version of MacOs". My current MacOs is Sonoma 14.5

Why does iTunes refuse to play MY songs that were uploaded from CD long ago?

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