Music Videos in Catalina

I'm seeing this as well and may have an answer, though I am still experimenting myself. It seems that Music only allows the "Music Video" option on m4v files. After the update to Catalina, all of my music videos that were in mpg or mp4 format are now labeled as "Movie", though they all still show up under my Music Videos tab and play fine. Since Apple wants us to use TV for mp4's, they may be trying to move away from that format in Music. Hopefully it will be fixed with a later update. If not, we'll need to convert all our music videos to m4v format so that Music can/will recognize them with the "Music Video" tag.

Are your files themselves actually gone/deleted? Because I did see something similar - music videos disappearing in Music playlists, but not the files themselves (in Finder).

The first 2 videos in my Music Videos list are mp4 by the band A-ha. When I used Get Info on the first one (Take On Me), it showed the tag as “Movie” like we mentioned above (all of my videos were tagged “Music Video” before the Catalina update). When I clicked OK, without changing anything, it “re-saved” it as Movie. That caused it to drop from my playlist, and now I only show 1 video by A-ha (the other one that I haven't touched).

Trying to add Take On Me back into my library doesn’t work, because Music thinks it's a Movie and won't take it. And of course, there's no option now to change it BACK to Music Video. Apple needs to correct this.

The only other option I can see is to convert them to m4v, but I couldn't find an app to do that (I only saw some online converters with a quick search, but I don't want to trust and/or rely on those). Neither VLC nor Handbrake seem to be able to convert to m4v either. Any suggestions?

I was worried about this issue before update to Catalina. I use Music Videos for work, spent an hour with support including supervisors yesterday and they said the only thing I could do was to fill out their "feature request form" to ask that the drop down menu in TV app would still have "music video" as an option.

Turns out, after some experimenting...I, along with many, am making this super difficult when apple made it super easy. Any video that I drag into "music" app on Mac (even mp4) is automatically copied to library and labeled "music video". the only issue or mistakes come when first the video is somehow in TV app which will make it a movie or home video. My existing library is syncing and updated just fine, and all new videos I drag to music are properly categorized...just don't double click a downloaded "music video" to open it before placing in MUSIC app or it may go to the TV app as a movie rather than opening in QuickTime, depending on your settings. I hope this helps. Just drag and drop :)

side note for those using converters...for some time, the codec with iskysoft media converter has cause an issue with iTunes, so if things are not importing it may be that converter, if I take the same file and encode in Adobe Media Converter, it is instantly recognized by iTunes now Music app.

I have a very large library of various media and had things beautifully organized under iTunes. I made the huge mistake of trusting Tim Cook's Apple and upgraded to Catalina and now all my media is a disaster.

As has been discussed here, my large collection of music videos are now split between the Music and TV apps, depending on file extension. This discussion includes a desire to use a converter to make mp4 music videos m4v. I did some research online and on HandBrake's web site the two filetypes are discussed and said they're both the same, the only difference being m4v files being able to include DRM. They say one only need change the file's extension and all will work perfectly. I tried it on a couple of videos and it indeed works. No need to waste money on an app to accomplish the deed. If you have a list of multiple files to convert you can merely control-click the highlighted list and in the resulting contextual menu select Rename "X" Items. Have it search for mp4 and replace the term with m4v. Presto!

If you have mp4 files you made yourself - using Wondershare, Adobe Rush, or iMovie... And you're on Catalina with an iPad Pro, you're completely out of luck.

You can import them into music, and rename the extension to m4v, and they do sync to the iPad. They show up in Finder as a check box with no info. Once they get on the iPad they simply vanish in the music app. At the bottom of the library under the ? icon, nothing. But they are there, wasting space.

The only way to get rid of these file is to un-sync which, of course removes everything.

They aren't in the TV app either. I have a $1200 device that won't allow me to view my own content. Absurd!

Yet more issues. Every day, I discover ever more frustrations with Catalina. Earlier this week I wanted to manually put selected music on a new iPhone 11. What a fiasco and unintuitive. I tried it similarly as I have for years, merely dragging files to the iPhone. The files got there but much of the metadata vanished, for instance, the album cover art, and took forever to transfer just one album. After reading the new required process, I was annoyed at how onerous it now is. I have to now drill down a lengthy list and check off selections then click Sync. What a waste!

Macs built a reputation for being intuitive and having multiple ways to accomplish a task. No more. Tasks are getting increasingly complicated and time consuming. This platform is quickly losing that edge.

At least Steve J. openly owned up to issues and made strides to correct them. We're now in an era of those responsible covering their tracks and trying to convince us everything is wonderful. Sad.

I'm now stuck with a huge media library that's completely screwed up and will take forever to fix. I spent years building that library for nothing. Thanks Cupertino.

I've got sort of the opposite issue. I have an M4V video which is a movie, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to import it to "TV & Movies". Every time I try and import it, (M4V, MP4, MOV), it is imported into "Music Videos". Anyone know what I'm missing?

The video was converted using the latest version of Handbrake, and I'm running Catalina 10.15.2.

Thanks!

Thanks! I put the missing mp4 (Take On Me) into the Add Automatically to Music folder. The Music app found it, “processed” it, and added back to my library tagged as a Music Video.