Like the title says: Does anybody know which exact file on disk stores star ratings for the Music app on macOS 15? Or, an alternate framing of the same question, is “What files do I need to restore to fully revert my Music library to an older version?"
I’m trying to restore my library from a backup, but it’s not behaving at all how I expect, and I’m not sure if star ratings are stored in ~/Music/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary, in the media folder (assuming you don’t have it in the same location as the default), in ~/Library/[???], or somewhere else. It doesn’t help that my user has been migrated through at least a decade of OSes, so there are many leftover iTunes files sitting around acting as possible red herrings.
Background: It appears that a decent chunk of old local files in my library lost their star ratings at some point in the last year or so, presumably as the result of an app upgrade and/or database corruption. Unfortunately I didn’t notice until considerably after the fact since I don’t sync regularly. I’ve run into a small handful of other people reporting the same issue online.
What I mean by “not how I expect”: I figured the solution was to just revert to an old library file, but just replacing (or deleting) Music Library.musiclibrary appears to just re-generate its contents when you open Music.app; replacing that file with a backup then rebooting (logout and back in might be sufficient) does seem, maybe, to actually change what’s displayed. But, when I replaced both the Music folder (including Music Library.musiclibrary) and the media folder (which is on a different drive) with a backup from about 2 years ago, it’s still messed up.
Hypothetically I could just be losing my mind and never rated those random 2000 songs despite being virtually certain I had (for years I rated everything in an album as soon as I imported it), or it could be that the corruption happened way earlier than I thought, or it could be that whatever bug caused this is just re-corrupting the restored library as soon as I open the app, or it could even be that I’m not actually restoring what I need to...
Suggestions appreciated!
I’m trying to restore my library from a backup, but it’s not behaving at all how I expect, and I’m not sure if star ratings are stored in ~/Music/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary, in the media folder (assuming you don’t have it in the same location as the default), in ~/Library/[???], or somewhere else. It doesn’t help that my user has been migrated through at least a decade of OSes, so there are many leftover iTunes files sitting around acting as possible red herrings.
Background: It appears that a decent chunk of old local files in my library lost their star ratings at some point in the last year or so, presumably as the result of an app upgrade and/or database corruption. Unfortunately I didn’t notice until considerably after the fact since I don’t sync regularly. I’ve run into a small handful of other people reporting the same issue online.
What I mean by “not how I expect”: I figured the solution was to just revert to an old library file, but just replacing (or deleting) Music Library.musiclibrary appears to just re-generate its contents when you open Music.app; replacing that file with a backup then rebooting (logout and back in might be sufficient) does seem, maybe, to actually change what’s displayed. But, when I replaced both the Music folder (including Music Library.musiclibrary) and the media folder (which is on a different drive) with a backup from about 2 years ago, it’s still messed up.
Hypothetically I could just be losing my mind and never rated those random 2000 songs despite being virtually certain I had (for years I rated everything in an album as soon as I imported it), or it could be that the corruption happened way earlier than I thought, or it could be that whatever bug caused this is just re-corrupting the restored library as soon as I open the app, or it could even be that I’m not actually restoring what I need to...
Suggestions appreciated!