Questions About Splitting My Music Collection?

[landshark2]

I'm using the native Music on my M4 Mini running Sequoia 15.7.3. I've found Apple instructions to change where new Music is stored, but what I need to do is take existing music files and move them to a new Media folder.

My first attempt to create different folders, didn't change how the albums show on my display, it just made the moved files unplayable.

Any insights would be appreciated.

 

[Ben J.]

Change where your music files are stored on Mac

In Music on Mac, change where your content is stored on your computer, manage your files, and create folders for better organization.

support.apple.com

The 'consolidate' function is probably what you want. If you've already moved the files out of the 'Music' folder, I'm not sure what you can do, unless you're able to restore from a backup.

 

[Tagbert]

Change where your music files are stored on Mac

In Music on Mac, change where your content is stored on your computer, manage your files, and create folders for better organization.

support.apple.com

The 'consolidate' function is probably what you want. If you've already moved the files out of the 'Music' folder, I'm not sure what you can do, unless you're able to restore from a backup.

They could just reimport the files. The main metadata is all in the files. custom albums would need to be resetup but the music files would be fine.

 

[landshark2]

Well I just moved the files back to their original external drive Music/Music/Media/Music folder location and things seem to be back to how they were before the first attempt. I didn't move any custom albums so nothing needed resetup.

I did discover nearly a dozen albums that wrongly had the various artists box checked, because moving compilations back lost the folder.

When you say custom albums, that doesn't appear to include albums where I added album art and changed dates to when it was recorded vs when it was released.

I don't work on Thursdays, so tomorrow I will make another attempt. This is all needed because I have a 256 GB iPhone and I'm closing in on 200 GB of music. As an example, I'm never going to listen to Robert Johnson, Django Reinhardt and/or any other pre 1959 music from my iPhone.