Music app: location of some songs show a completely unrelated file. How to fix it?

[rgomez]

Hello,

I installed Catalina in a new MBPr some weeks ago, and updated my iTunes library there. The library and the music are on an external SSD.

Most of my music are ALAC rips from my CDs. I have been using more and more Apple Music this year, but still, the big majority of my music is like I said.

Today I tried to hear one disk, from start to finish (I usually put "everything in random") and noticed that the last 3 tracks did not play. The app didn't say nor complain about anything. I checked the Info screen, everything looked fine except the last tab, the File one. The location showed something completely unrelated to a music file or the location of the actual files from that album.

This is another song that shows the same issue:

Now: the files are correctly on the folder, and from that same album, for instance, some of the next songs show everything fine:

I can just delete the incorrect songs and drag & drop them from Finder, but, apart from that screwing with the statistics (which , granted, are not *that* important) the big problem is identifying the corrupt songs in the library. I have... uhm, I can't find where to see the total number of songs in this damn new version... well, more than 35,000 songs. I certainly can't check one by one. And being that this doesn't show any error when trying to play this files, but just stops or jumps to the next one, I have been probably 2 or 3 weeks with this issue without noticing.

I thought about checking the database itself, but can't find any info on how or what to open the .musicdb file. Probably an SQLite db?

Edit: I tried opening the .musicdb with SQLite but it asks for a password, so... I guess they are in fact SQLite databases but there won't be a way to modify them by hand.

Somebody else who has this or similar problems?

Oh: I have already checked, several times, the SSD (which is formatted with APFS) with Disk Utility, with no problems reported at all.

Thanks!

 

[rgomez]

Exported the library to XML and found that I have about 480 songs with this problem. But still, the problem is how to fix them, as there is apparently no way to edit the location of the files from within the Music app...

 

[haralds]

In the past I have just done large scale search and replacement on the XML file and imported that. But Music has been unable to import the XML file without hanging.
I need to use a bastardized iTunes to that and then import its DB directly to Music.

 

[rgomez]

Thanks for the reply. The problem is that I think the corruption happened precisely on the import from iTunes to Music. My iTunes library is fine, I can't find any incorrect references on the XML file from iTunes.

I spent 1 hour or so today with Apple Support. They gave me lots of different "reasons" for why this happened. At some point they even said that this happened because my previous library was from a version pre-Catalina, as if the conversion from iTunes -> Music was not supported...

At the end they went the easy way (as there is no way to prove or refute it) and said that I should have done a reorganization of my library in iTunes (the process that moves the files around to match the iTunes organization... which in my case is pointless as the files are already like that! iTunes had always the "organize music" enabled) before doing the conversion. So, basically, I can either try reimporting the library again and see if it's better (but then this last 2 weeks of history/changes are gone), or just manually delete and add the songs that are corrupt.

 

[haralds]

After some "manual intervention" most of my tracks are fine. I am using v1.0.2 from the 1.15.2beta2.
Alas, the album art is still missing despite the fact I always embed them in the track! Doing a get Info shows it right there.
I think it is optimized for Apple Music, everything else is an afterthought.