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iPod playlist without iTunes
- Thread starter zoran
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A quick google search:
Sync music between your Mac and iPhone or iPad
On your Mac, sync all or a selection of music to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
support.apple.com
iTunes stored its library and media files under your home directory in ~/Music/iTunes. You should be able to recover this folder from your TM backup, and then import the iTunes music files into Music.app. There are a couple of ways to do this. But first, it's important to know if you're dealing only with music files, or if you have podcasts, audio books, or videos in your old iTunes library. Your first step should be to recover the iTunes folder from your TM backup, and then we can try to help you decide how to proceed.
I should also mention the Retroactive app which would let you install iTunes on Catalina and later versions of macOS. The author is suggesting that people move on to Music.app, Podcasts.app, etc., but as far as I know it still works for installing iTunes on Intel based Macs.
The simplest approach would be to hold the option key while starting Music and select choose a different library. In the file chooser window which opens, navigate to ~/Music/iTunes and select the iTunes library file iTunes Library.itl. Music should use that to create a new Music library which points to all of the files in the iTunes folder. When you look in the Music Settings Files tab, it should be be ~/iTunes/iTunes Media. One downside of doing things this way is that any new music that you import will go into ~/Music/Music/Media, so you'll have music files in two different directory structures.
A somewhat cleaner approach is to import your music files into Music using File -> Import... in the Music app. In the file chooser window which opens, navigate to ~/iTunes and select the iTunes Media folder. The Music app will import the music files found under that folder into its own directory structure. Before doing this, look at the Music settings Files tab and make sure that Keep Music Media folder organized and Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library are both checked. Importing this way actually makes a new copy of the music files, so you have to have enough space to hold both copies, at least temporarily. When you're happy with the result, you can delete the old iTunes directory and contents to reclaim the space.
With the first method, any iTunes playlists might be preserved (I can't remember) but in the second method they will be definitely be lost. The time to save your playlists would've been when you were still running iTunes, as in this YT video. You might also discover that much of your album art is MIA after importing into the Music app. If Automatically update artwork for imported songs is checked in the Advanced tab of the Music app settings, the missing artwork will be updated from the Apple Music service over time.
Your first order of business is going to be getting access to your old iTunes folder. If you used Migration Assistant to recover your files and settings from the old OS when you installed Catalina, it should already be there. If not, you'll have to use Migration Assistant to restore from your Time Machine disk. Be sure to read this document, especially regarding creating a duplicate user - to avoid screwing up your current files and settings, you may have to do that and then copy the the iTunes folder from the duplicate user's home folder into yours, after which you can delete the duplicate user.
A somewhat cleaner approach is to import your music files into Music using File -> Import... in the Music app. In the file chooser window which opens, navigate to ~/iTunes and select the iTunes Media folder. The Music app will import the music files found under that folder into its own directory structure. Before doing this, look at the Music settings Files tab and make sure that Keep Music Media folder organized and Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library are both checked. Importing this way actually makes a new copy of the music files, so you have to have enough space to hold both copies, at least temporarily. When you're happy with the result, you can delete the old iTunes directory and contents to reclaim the space.
With the first method, any iTunes playlists might be preserved (I can't remember) but in the second method they will be definitely be lost. The time to save your playlists would've been when you were still running iTunes, as in this YT video. You might also discover that much of your album art is MIA after importing into the Music app. If Automatically update artwork for imported songs is checked in the Advanced tab of the Music app settings, the missing artwork will be updated from the Apple Music service over time.
Your first order of business is going to be getting access to your old iTunes folder. If you used Migration Assistant to recover your files and settings from the old OS when you installed Catalina, it should already be there. If not, you'll have to use Migration Assistant to restore from your Time Machine disk. Be sure to read this document, especially regarding creating a duplicate user - to avoid screwing up your current files and settings, you may have to do that and then copy the the iTunes folder from the duplicate user's home folder into yours, after which you can delete the duplicate user.
I have just used Retroactive to install iTunes 12.6.5.3 on an iMac running Catalina 10.15.7 and it works just great -- I like it way better than the dreadful, annoying Music app, and it allows me to utilize several old iPods that I still have and would like to still be able to use. I have to conclude that Apple is deliberately trying to make their older tech really difficult to use so that it's practically obsolete and people will just give up and move to Apple Music service -- but I'll never do that.
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