All my music has the cloud icon beside it even though it's all stored locally

Question

All my music has the cloud icon beside it even though it's all stored locally

So I had a little internet outage this morning. I somewhat recently turned on the iCloud Music Library, went to listen to some music during this outage, and despite having 130GB of music files in the media folder listed in iTunes preferences, I couldn't play anything in iTunes! It's all greyed out because I haven't downloaded it, but it feels quite silly to download a bunch of files that I already have stored locally. I'd basically be duplicating my whole library.

Does anyone know a way to basically tell iTunes to consider the files in the Media Library folder to *be* downloaded versions of all the songs in my library? Or some other way to have the ability to listen to music offline without essentially duplicating my whole library?

Thanks!

iMac 21.5" 4K, macOS 10.14

Posted on Mar 22, 2019 8:10 AM

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Answer 1

dwb

Level 7

33,326 points

Mar 22, 2019 11:24 AM in response to jasonthefirst

It is possible to have more than one iTunes library and there are some (semi) good reasons for doing so. Songs can be in more than one library if you choose to have more than one - what happened to you is that a new library was created and those songs weren't part of it.

You can either keep the old library or you can add the "lost" music to the new one. To add the "lost" music, drag the folder with the songs onto the iTunes icon on the dock. That will add them.

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Answer 2

dwb

Level 7

33,326 points

Mar 22, 2019 8:39 AM in response to jasonthefirst

See this Apple article for an explanation of iCloud icons. About iCloud Music Library icons and status - Apple Support

If the icon has the down arrow thru the cloud then we need to talk about your iTunes library, but otherwise the above article may answer your question.

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Answer 3

Mar 22, 2019 10:05 AM in response to dwb

It does have the down arrow.

I did find an old iTunes library folder on an external drive, and when loading that library, the icons are gone. But when I load the local library file, the songs are all back to the down-arrow cloud. Could this be the explanation though? Are actual files only allowed to be associated with one iTunes library or something?

Thanks so much for your reply!

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Answer 4

Mar 22, 2019 11:27 AM in response to dwb

Seems easy enough!

Quick q though, if I were to add that 'lost' music back, would my library then contain two versions of all the 'lost' songs, or is iTunes smart enough to basically detect that those songs already exist in my library and not duplicate entries?

Thanks again!!

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Answer 5

dwb

Level 7

33,326 points

Mar 22, 2019 12:45 PM in response to jasonthefirst

If your music on the old and current iTunes library are on the same hard drive you are not going to get duplicates. If they are on diffenrt drives you’ll have music added to the current library.

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All my music has the cloud icon beside it even though it's all stored locally

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