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landshark2

macrumors member
Original poster
This is a continuation of my never ending desire to have my fairly extensive album collection arranged how I want it on my iPhone.

My current iPhone is only a 256 GB model, so today I looked at removing some unused apps. I didn't look closely at GarageBand, just got rid of it, but Numbers also had more than 10 gigabytes of data so I checked out that data and it is all m4a music files?

After blindly getting rid of the GarageBand app and its gigabytes of documents & data, my top 5 storage entries are; Synced Media - 56.83 GB, RedTiger - 18.95 GB, Photos - 17.01 GB, Numbers - 10.27 GB, Music - 7.92 GB.

Clicking on Synced Media, the first page just shows the Music icon, at 56.82 GB. RedTiger contains 18.91 GB documents & data (DashCam video), Photos contains 17.01 GB of photos and videos, Numbers contains 9.71 GB of music file, and Music shows 7.88 GB of documents and data, but below it shows All Songs at 64.41 Gb and Artists at 64.96 GB.

I have all these files backed up to external storage, and am preparing to remove the vast majority of photos and videos, plus all the music files, so I can import my now larger music collection. The last time that I imported the music collection, I had deleted the Music app, disconnected from the internet and tried to just import the Music folder from the external drive, but I ended up with the Music app as well.

Just looking at my collection through the Music app, things were "close" to what I desired, so I accepted that as a minor victory.

Well anyway, I'm just curious to know if anyone out there can enlighten me on why the music files aren't in one location? (and I pretty much assume some of my music files were in GarageBand)
 
There’s Numbers App data that can be stored on your iPhone or the Numbers Folder on iCloud.
It’s really easy to miss where stuff get stored- locally or on iCloud.

It could have been that for some reason a music file got stored in the Numbers app locally or on iCloud- then everything saved afterwards to the same place by default if you never checked where it was going.
Also…. Often when deleting an app on iPhone, the app gets deleted but not the data that was stored there. It stays hidden.
So download & install Garage Band again - and see if your music files still exist.
 
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