Apologies, I'm sure this has been discussed here before, but I can't find a thread that matches my case much.
So, I am an Apple Music subscriber, iTunes user from the first version, and someone who has transitioned from having one personal Mac to having several older Macs. I had one designated music Mac, that I reimported my whole music library into from whatever the old Mac had been, just giving up on keeping my playlists and all metadata. That was an iMac with only 256 GB of storage, so the media files were stored on an external hd. This was before Apple Music launched. Library is about 600 GB but when I finally subscribed to Apple Music, over time, it successfully uploaded 99.5 percent of my files. Great!
But, this week my old tertiary Mac laptop died, and I decided to upgrade to a Mac Studio through the recent Costco deal. So I decommissioned the old music Mac, ported its ~/Music/ folder to the new Mac, moved the external HD to the new Mac, and launched Music.app. I prefer not to do any kind of migration from old Macs to new Macs, backup and replication seemingly being somewhat deprecated by Apple in favor of generally being Cloud-first. After a bit everything filled in but I could see that it was just representing my cloud library — for music files that existed locally, I could not right click and choose "show in finder" for example. Despite the music library pointing to the correct location on the external drive.
What is it I have to do to get back to the state of having one canonical Mac music library, which Music.app knows is stored locally on an external drive, and keeps synced to the cloud?
Thanks so much, a music hoarder.
So, I am an Apple Music subscriber, iTunes user from the first version, and someone who has transitioned from having one personal Mac to having several older Macs. I had one designated music Mac, that I reimported my whole music library into from whatever the old Mac had been, just giving up on keeping my playlists and all metadata. That was an iMac with only 256 GB of storage, so the media files were stored on an external hd. This was before Apple Music launched. Library is about 600 GB but when I finally subscribed to Apple Music, over time, it successfully uploaded 99.5 percent of my files. Great!
But, this week my old tertiary Mac laptop died, and I decided to upgrade to a Mac Studio through the recent Costco deal. So I decommissioned the old music Mac, ported its ~/Music/ folder to the new Mac, moved the external HD to the new Mac, and launched Music.app. I prefer not to do any kind of migration from old Macs to new Macs, backup and replication seemingly being somewhat deprecated by Apple in favor of generally being Cloud-first. After a bit everything filled in but I could see that it was just representing my cloud library — for music files that existed locally, I could not right click and choose "show in finder" for example. Despite the music library pointing to the correct location on the external drive.
What is it I have to do to get back to the state of having one canonical Mac music library, which Music.app knows is stored locally on an external drive, and keeps synced to the cloud?
Thanks so much, a music hoarder.
