Almost half of Music Library Suddenly Gone....UPDATE

[Attirex]

Thanks for all the advice! I'll try to move the music files to another location and see if that fixes anything. FYI, they are currently on an external SSD drive.

UPDATE - Well, another data point - no matter where I move the Music folder and then point Music to the folder, I'm seeing only 5,189 tracks. Out of curiosity, I displayed the Cloud Download column in Music after this last attempt, and for every track, Music indicates the song has NOT been downloaded.

To confirm, I picked a random song and was able to select Download command, and then the file downloaded. What the actual f***. Even though the Finder indicates the files reside on my Mac SSD and external drives, they actually don't?

 

[Attirex]

So some albums aren't showing up in the Music app, even though I have confirmed the files are on my external SSD in the Music folder. I have no idea how many. So seems to be a file/read issue with the Music app?

 

[JamesMay82]

So some albums aren't showing up in the Music app, even though I have confirmed the files are on my external SSD in the Music folder. I have no idea how many. So seems to be a file/read issue with the Music app?

It’s a massive ball ache… but in the past when I’ve had similar issues…

I would just start a brand new fresh library and then re import music from the folder that has the files… I’d do it it batches so it’s not like ok much for it…

It’s a pain to do but you feel better for it after knowing you have a fresh library..


Maybe you just picked up some bloat along the way which has messed it up…

 

[p33t3r]

OT, but "third party" means anything not produced by Apple, so almost everything in the app store is third party.

Tunesweeper isn't a third party app. It's available on Apple's app store app.

 

[a-m-k]

I assumed nothing found in the Apple Store was third party. Thank you.

 

[Attirex]

OK, I took everyone's advice and created a new library, moving it from an external SSD to the Mini's SSD. I had to spend time deleting a ton of duplicates, but think I've gotten things back to where they were last week. Phew. Thanks for all of your help.