Trouble Changing Music Library Location in Big Sur

[Hrothgar]

I recently upgraded to Big Sur. I've got 700 gb of music files on an external drive. I can't get my new Mac Mini to keep the music library location on the external drive. I delete the music library.musiclibrary file on the hard drive. But it keeps moving the library location back to the Music folder on the internal hard drive/users etc. And then it downloads all of my purchased music files from the cloud onto my hard drive. I keep changing the folder and deleting these files, but it keeps changing it back.

What am I missing?

 

[Phil77354]

Apples support pages have various articles that may help you in accomplishing this. For example:

Move your iTunes library to another computer

On your PC, use the iTunes backup feature to move your library to a new computer.

support.apple.com

Use multiple libraries in Music on Mac

On your Mac, use multiple libraries and switch between them.

support.apple.com

I keep my own music library on an external drive and have not had any issues.

 

[chabig]

I delete the music library.musiclibrary file on the hard drive.

Don't do that. That's the metadata associated with your stuff. I think you are confusing that with the actual media files themselves. Set the location of the media files in Music > Preferences > Files > Music media folder location.

The library file (library.musiclibrary) is very small. It stays where it is.

 

[Hrothgar]

Thanks -- I seem to have solved half my problem. I now have Music pointed to the media folder on my external drive, which is what I wanted. Then I imported all of those files. Problem is, Music still has "files" for hundreds of albums that were on the old drive. They're duplicates of many albums on the external drive, and all the songs appear twice in the songs list on Music. If I try to play one of these, I get the error message that the file can't be found. How do I get rid of these from Music?

 

[Phil77354]

I'm not sure exactly how you have arrived at this point but if you did not follow the steps I posted earlier, for moving the music library from one location to another, then I suspect this is why (or at least partially why) the Music app has not fully recognized what you've done.

At this point I would still recommend that you review the Apple support documents, also there will be others that may be applicable if you look for them, and they should guide you to doing what is necessary to correct this. Trying to manually move files without fully understanding how they are used in the Music application is going to be problematic.

 

[BeeRich33]

I keep my own music library on an external drive and have not had any issues.

I'm trying to migrate my music from El Capitan to Big Sur. External RAID now works, but I simply couldn't point to it.

So had to re-drag all files to build a new library, and now I can't get playlists to be fully recognized. My playlists are only a fraction, and I don't know why, since playlists are just a reference to the UUID in the library.xml.