Copy Apple Music over to new MAC

[marcel500]

Hey, I got a new Mac and I want to make sure I copy everything over from my old Mac to my new Mac. First of all I do have my music library on an external hard drive. So there is not need to export the library but what about "all my playlists" and the "song information like count"? Is this part of the library or do I need to do something manual here? If yes, anyone knows a good tool to do this?

thanks a lot.

 

[chabig]

Transfer to a new Mac with Migration Assistant - Apple Support

Migration Assistant transfers documents, apps, user accounts, and settings from one Mac to another. It doesn’t delete information from your old Mac or replace the operating system (macOS) on your new Mac.

support.apple.com

 

[marcel500]

Thanks a lot but what if I don't have my old MAC anymore at the time I receive the new one? Any other method? It is really only Apple Music.

 

[chabig]

The meta data you want isn’t on the external disk. It’s on your original Mac in files located in home > Music > iTunes. If you no longer have the original Mac (or a backup) you've already lost that data. But if you have at least a backup, the easiest way to get that to the new Mac is to use Migration Assistant, as described by Apple in post #2. Alternatively, you could just copy the iTunes folder to the new computer.

 

[FaustsHausUK]

If you subscribe to Apple Music (monthly fee), or iTunes Match (annual fee), you can sync your library through the cloud. Support doc: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204926

All my playlists, songs and metadata sync just fine. The only issue is if I customise a playlist's view, that doesn't transfer (e.g. for playlists, I choose View As Songs, Display Column Browser, and adjust the columns shown - these stay on the original device).

 

[marcel500]

Thanks everyone.

Just to double confirm, since I have my iTunes music folder on an external disk I have retained all meta information and playlists already - correct? I don't need to export the playlists at least?

I don't have Apple Music neither iTunes match since I am having a lot of high definition music imported.

I will also check out the migration assistant on this.

 

[chabig]

...since I have my iTunes music folder on an external disk I have retained all meta information and playlists already - correct?

I don’t think that’s correct. I expect you’ve lost your meta information. The folder on your external drive likely only contains the media files.

 

[marcel500]

Very difficult and confusing the whole process... Wondering why apple can't have a proper export functionality.

 

[n-evo]

So for the first time since I've own a Mac with iTunes the whole experience of putting my Music Library back has been a disaster. I had to bring my MacBook Pro in for repairs. Because of a f*** up on Apple's part with Touch ID they ended up replacing the whole logic board with SSD.

After setting up macOS Catalina I put back my Music library folder I keep on an external - Mac formatted - drive to my MacBook Pro.

Frist option: Music failed to load all album art. Loging in with my Apple ID and fetching album art Music did nothing to fix this. Not a single match was made, no album art downloaded. Tried this a couple of times. No dice.

Second option with a clean library folder: Enabled iTunes Match, tried downloading songs from the cloud. One download error after another. Apparently Music was unable to fetch my music from the cloud due to server errors on Apple's side of things. Great. Tracks that did download managed to produce album art though. Also tried this a couple of times. The many download errors made it pointless to continue.

Third option with a clean library folder: used the import setting to get the song files from my Music Library folder on the external drive. Managed to produce imported songs with album art. For the most part that is. All purchased songs from the iTunes Store came up blank. Telling Music to fetch album art once again didn't do anything to fix this issue. Since this option managed to produce the most songs with album art I ended up added the album art myself. I had to manually download each art file from https://bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/. Unbelievable.

Honestly, what is up? I've never ever had this much problems with restoring my Music Library from my external drive. With iTunes it was always a matter of placing the iTunes Library folder back to ~/Music and launch the app. Easy peasy.

 

[posguy99]

I don’t think that’s correct. I expect you’ve lost your meta information. The folder on your external drive likely only contains the media files.

It depends on where you are keeping the .itl files. iTunes is perfectly happy to have everything be on the external, and that's what I do. I have no idea what Catalina's Music.app might do, I don't use it and don't plan to even think about it until Mojave goes out of support next year. My laptop is running Catalina but is not authoritative for the music library.