Playlists and Music Disappearing Repeatedly in Music app

[witchkitten]

I am having a hugely time consuming and devastating issue with the Music app. About six months ago I got a new (refurbished) MacBook Pro. Happily it came with Catalina installed instead of one of the newer OSes but the Music app has been a total disaster. I have thousands upon thousands of songs organized into folders the way I like them not in the Media folder. Of course none of my playlists or music transferred over to the Music app when I moved from my old computer, which still had iTunes and High Sierra so I had to add all of my music and recreat hundreds of playlists. Before doing so, I turned off "Keep Music Folder Organized" and "Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library" in the preferences, which I have never used because I despise Apple's way of sorting music. I spent hours recreating playlists and about halfway through recreating them all they disappeared. When I checked the preferences both "Keep Music Folder Organized" and "Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library" were back to being checked, which I didn't do. I thought this was just a glitch so I unchecked them again and spent even more hours recreating all of my playlists. All was good for a couple months but I just now opened the Music app again to find all of the playlists deleted and all of the music I added gone again. When I went back to preferences both "Keep Music Folder Organized" and "Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library" were checked again. How do I keep this from happening? I would try to find a more stable, easier to use, music app but I need the Music app to add music to my iPhone. For the record, I manually manage music on my iPhone too and I don't sync the music to iCloud either. It will take me countless hours and days to recreate all of my playlists and add all my music again and I don't want to go through it unless I can be sure that the Music app won't keep deleting my music and playlists and checking "Keep Music Folder Organized" and "Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library" again. How do I stop the Music app from changing my preferences and deleting all of my manually managed music? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[jafo72]

Hello, I have a similar issue that has been annoying me for the last 8 months. I look for playlists created by apple and I add them to my library. So far so good. The problem starts when randomly I try to play the playlists that I added to my library and most of the songs in the playlists are no longer there. Then at random times the songs reappear in the playlist. This issue only happens if I add the playlists to my library. If I play them outside of my library, songs do not disappear. Is anyone else having this issue?

 

[jonh229]

FWIW, the music app drives me nuts. All my music is self recorded mp3’s stored on a NAS (use smb connection). I don’t have any playlists. So far, my best luck has been by using filer and clicking on a song. That spawns the music app and it mostly works. In the menu I select shuffle by album. I have the music app media folder pointing to the NAS.

 

[George Dawes]

I've given up on it , it used to be so easy to use , now it's a total nightmare

Just trying to find something on the iTunes store is so long winded I ended up just quitting the damn thing

'if it ain't broke don't fix it'

 

[Insidious]

I don't know if the Music app ever got properly fixed on Catalina, but it was pretty buggy with stuff like the issue you are having. Your best bet is to use Retroactive to install iTunes. iTunes works great on Catalina.