How To Put Music In Itunes Library

[Niobe Hennigan]

Anyidea how I can get the Music app to upgrade and see my older iTunes music library? There are plenty of playlists, ratings, play counts, album artwork from rare CDs that I scanned myself, even some digitised vinyl. This process has worked with previous OS updates, so I would expect my backed up iTunes library should somehow be able to be imported.

Had the same problem, but finally resolved with Apple Tech Support. The key was in how you open the MUSIC app. Hold down the OPTION key while opening the MUSIC app. You will see a dialog box. Pick the option "Choose Library". Now, navigate to your ITL file (not XML) for the old iTunes database you want to import and double click it. The MUSIC app will then ask you to Save this as a new Music Library. Give it a different name than your other library(s). Pick a location etc. Once that is done, you still have one final step - to change the default directory of your actual music files. Go to MUSIC preferences, select Files directory, and change it to where your actual audio files are. MUSIC app will then ask you to organize, click YES. This took 2 hours to do on my iTunes database (153,263 songs, library size 8.4 TB). I was originally on Sierra 10.12.6 using iTunes 12.8.2.3.

Yes Yes! Finally I found someone with the same issue as me.. (Probably same as you) I have been using fr 10+ years now and have put a lot of effort into organizing my music library which I cannot access anymore. This is heavily disappointing and I hope that Apple will deliver a solution soon!

iTunes Music is the old name for iTunes Media, suggesting your library might originate from iTunes 8 or earlier. Ideally at some point along the way you would have simply renamed the folder and iTunes would have worked it all out, leaving your library in better shape for the next migration/upgrade. It is possible that the Music import routine assumes that the media folder should be iTunes Media, and simply ignores everything it cannot find. Mobile Applications in the library folder also points to an older layout which again, I guess, could potentially cause problems. See Make a split library portable - Apple Community for some background. If nothing else works you might need to get access to an computer running Mojave so you can rearrange the library into the standard shape before bringing it over to Catalina.

Otherwise see Empty/corrupt iTunes/Music library after upgrade/crash - Apple Community to try repairing the library with a copy from the Previous iTunes Libraries folder. I'd suggest copying, pasting, and renaming as if you were going to open iTunes with rather than simply accessing the file in the Previous iTunes Libraries folder.

You can import all of the media files that you have, that isn't a problem. Importing the playlists won't work if the tracks aren't where the playlists record them as being. This isn't anything unique to Music, iTunes, or any other software. When you move content from one computer to another, and there are any kind of internal references, then you need to make sure that you're being sympathetic to the way the software works. For iTunes libraries this is discussed in detail in Make a split library portable - Apple Community. Music may be able to import the .itl database of a portable iTunes Library when it has been moved, although I don't think I've tested that scenario as yet. The XML file import would definitely fail however.

When I today copied the Library from the HDD to the new SSD and did the Same Alt + Icon Click Method using the new Music App that is widely suggested, the Songs wouldn't play (! sign in Music App), since the original Path of the Song wasn't the same (compared to the HHD), although, all playlists and everything were there and seemed to be fine.

you can - to test things - also try it with only one album you pick out of your itunes media folder and drop it on the music.app mediathek GUI (?) then check if the path to the file has changed - cause it should have...

So I thought if in the old setup the actual iTunes Library.itl was residing on a non-system volume (Data/Music/iTunes Library) along with all the ripped albums, how the heck the new Music app is going to tell the difference if I make the path to the library database file exactly the same?

I then changed the name of the external drive from the default "LaCie" to "Data", Option-selected the Music App on the Mac mini, pointed to the old iTunes Library.itl database and voil! - all of my files and playlists are here.

I hope the above makes sense. In any case, the solution seems to be to move your library and the location of the database to an external volume and do the same so you skip the extra steps here because of my unnecessarily complex scenario (moving the library from the internal hard drive an old computer running High Sierra to the external drive on the new one running Catalina)

after deleting everything in the Music folders, and rebooting, I actually got (partially) what I was hoping for! My library seemed to just... appear! None of the music files are present, but they're mostly available to download from the Cloud, thanks to iTunes Match.

Copying the files I have in the correct location, does NOT equal to downloading the file. In fact, if I place the music file in the correct folder where Music expects to find it, the track still shows as downloadable, and if I do that, it creates a file right next to the one I placed myself, with a " 1" suffixed to the name. No good.

So I export my song library. I get an xml file. All the file locations are formatted with the old file structure, iTunes Media etc etc.. I don't think I want that. I reboot to the NEW disk. I export the library again, to compare the two files. I cut all the info from the OLD library file except for one song, which happens to have not been matched, nor uploaded, but still showed up from my Cloud library (kudos!).

When I select "Choose Library..." and point it at my "iTunes Library.itl" file, it doesn't like it and pops up the same dialogue box again. If instead I select "Create Library..." it launches and shows just my iTunes purchases, none of my ripped tracks. So the behaviour we are observing is not "half importing" or anything like that. It's actually not importing anything at all, as if the .itl file were not at all parseable.

I am an elementary music teacher and have purchased hundreds of songs through Amazon digital music. Last night, I purchased a song on Amazon but this morning was unsuccessful in downloading it onto my iMac and therefore unable to get it into my iTunes library. In a lengthy online chat with Amazon, the tech finally discovered that music purchased on Amazon will not be allowed to be downloaded into an iTunes library, by order of Apple! I tried to purchase the same song from the iTunes store, but it is not available. Can someone please explain the logic of this to me?

"To access and play your Amazon Music purchases in iTunes or Windows Media Player, you first need to download the songs to your computer. You can then move the downloaded files from where they're saved on your computer to your iTunes or Windows Media Player library.

Music you have purchased can be downloaded to your computer. By default it will be put into an Amazon Music folder that is inside your Music folder. You can then drag the music just downloaded into iTunes. However you cannot download Amazon Streamed music to iTunes which is what I suspect you were trying to do.

The Amazon tech person I "chatted" with this morning said that this was something new that they had just been told, that per Apple, music purchased from Amazon could not be downloaded/moved/whatever to iTunes.

What might be confusing your "tech" person is that the Amazon Digital Music Store -- just like the iTunes Store and Google Play Music -- does a lot of things to nudge you into subscribing to their streaming service rather than buying a download. If you ignore all that, it works the way it always did.

After a few bumps in upgrading my iMac from Mojave to Catalina I've been trying to load my large music library from iTunes into Music App. When I try to select my iTunes Libary to start up in Music (hold down Option + Music Icon) the music app does not read the .itl file and tries to create a new one. I have a large music library (20k mp3s) and I do not want to re-import all of them. Doing so will remove my play counts and ratings history. Is there a way to get this conversion to work? Is there another tool I need to use?

I was able to import the Mojave (iTunes) library by placing a copy of the library.itl in the music folder - used the "option key" when opening the Music app - it does ask to "Create or Choose" a library (just like iTunes) - so I selected the old library and the Music App then asked to save as a new "Music 1" library

Hey guys! same problem here.when I select my ITL file, it just starts to load and load. I left it on for about 8h but nothing. If i Import the library it take 5 minutes.. so shouldn't be that long the proces of opening an existing library.have you guys found a solution?cheers

For the past couple of weeks a whole bunch of the songs from my iTunes library stop early and skip to the next song (just as if it was at the end of the song). Although the point where it skips varies for each song (for one song it is 2:32, another is 2:46), it will always skip at the same point for each song.

A few days ago I backed up my iTunes library and reformatted my hard drive (for a completely unrelated issue) and reinstalled OS X from scratch. The problem was happening before and after the reinstall.

This problem also persists when the music is synced across to my iPod touch running 3.0. Listening to the same troublesome songs in my iPod causes them to end prematurely. However, I can listen to the whole song using Quicklook, so the problem must be with my iTunes library or something.

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