Import iTunes library into clean installation of Catalina

Hullo all, hope you can help:

I backed up my iTunes library (the entire "iTunes" folder—contains about 95GB of music ripped from my CDs) on an external hard disk.
I installed Catalina on a newly reformatted hard disk on my iMac.
I copied the backed up iTunes library into ~/Music (Home folder → Music).
I launched the Music app. It showed my handful of iTunes purchases, but not my playlists nor the music I had ripped from CDs. 🤔

Clearly, my iTunes library was not upgraded at that point. The Music app was just seeing the music associated with my iCloud account. Second try:

I quit and I deleted the new "Music" folder that was created (~/Music/Music).
I launched the Music app holding down option. It asked me the choose a music Library and pointed it to the "iTunes Library.itl" file (~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.itl).
The Music app launched. Again, only my iTunes purchases appeared, no playlists. 😢

Any idea how I can get the Music app to upgrade and see my older iTunes music library? There are plenty of playlists, ratings, play counts, album artwork from rare CDs that I scanned myself, even some digitised vinyl. This process has worked with previous OS updates, so I would expect my backed up iTunes library should somehow be able to be imported.

Any thoughts?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Oct 14, 2019 1:29 PM

Top-ranking reply

Orestes Chouchoulas Author

Level 1

24 points

Posted on Nov 13, 2019 1:31 AM

For anyone who still has this issue, I have a partial solution.

In the Music app, go to File → Library → Import Playlist… then navigate to your old iTunes folder and select the iTunes Music Library.xml file. Music will take a while (maybe half an hour, maybe one hour for my library of about 15,000 tracks—I went for lunch), but it will import all your music and playlists, including smart playlists. At least it did in my case after every other method had failed. Ratings and most other metadata was imported as well.

⚠️ Be careful—this is not a perfect solution:

It changes the “date added” information for every track to the time when you do the import. This may have implications to you if you are using that date to make smart playlists.
In my case it lost some of the artwork. From what I can tell, all of the artwork that I had scanned and pasted myself is present. My guess is that the lost artwork came from the iTunes Store by me selecting “get album artwork” in the past.
This method will also import any podcasts as songs. You can sort your music by genre to easily select and delete all the podcasts. Then sort by duration and scan everything that has “continuous” as duration. This will include old radio channels and podcast subscriptions as far as I can tell. You may need to delete those as well. You should be able to redownload those from the Podcasts app.

Hopefully, this is helpful to someone. It's a good enough solution for me for the moment.

(@turingtest2 You may need to include some of this in one of your guides.)

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93 replies

Feb 14, 2020 5:38 AM in response to MacMarwil

(Pre-) Final report:

The step of dropping the iTunes Media folder onto the Musik Mediathek’s sidebar does NOT duplicate any files; it just added a few tunes that hadn’t been organized by the former .itl file.

AND: Adding totally new files doesn’t create a new music/media folder. The app Musik puts new music into my old iTunes Media folder. The newly created “Music” folder only contains the newly created (and active) ”Music Library” file, nothing else.

Unfortunately, if the counter on the bottom of the Musik window doesn’t lie, over 1,000 albums have disappeared.

Possibly there has been a mess of earlier tunes cleaned up (I didn’t care for my iTunes in the first years, it’s only six years that I’m doing an accurate job here) but I can’t tell for the moment.

Otherwise everything seems to run smoothly. Adding date tags have been kept (back to 2008 where a major crash made me add every tune from scratch after running iTunes since 2000).

Next step: Making my DJ software understand the new lib …

Feb 14, 2020 8:23 AM in response to MacMarwil

quote:

„AND: Adding totally new files doesn’t create a new music/media folder. The app Musik puts new music into my old iTunes Media folder.“

This sounds like you haven‘t changed the music.app media path in the preferences of the software... you can upload a screenshot of your preferences and see what it looks like...

and regarding the dj software - it better is not relying on the .xml file that itunes used to create...

Feb 15, 2020 12:38 PM in response to Orestes Chouchoulas

I always open iTunes, go to settings and set the iTunes media folder in my external drive as the location of my iTunes library, and then import a folder, select the entire external folder and watch it go.

When it's finally done with that operation, I have all my iTunes stuff in my new install.

Smettila

Level 1

4 points

Apr 6, 2020 12:50 PM in response to Smettila

Keeping track:

after deleting everything in the Music folders, and rebooting, I actually got (partially) what I was hoping for! My library seemed to just... appear! None of the music files are present, but they're mostly available to download from the Cloud, thanks to iTunes Match.

Copying the files I have in the correct location, does NOT equal to downloading the file. In fact, if I place the music file in the correct folder where Music expects to find it, the track still shows as downloadable, and if I do that, it creates a file right next to the one I placed myself, with a " 1" suffixed to the name. No good.

But I could live with not having all my physical files, if:

I could totally trust the matching algorithm (I can't, I've caught it before)
the song count were exactly the same

After rebooting to the OLD disk, I discover it's short about 150 songs, which is about 2% of my songs. No good.

So I export my song library. I get an xml file. All the file locations are formatted with the old file structure, iTunes Media etc etc.. I don't think I want that. I reboot to the NEW disk. I export the library again, to compare the two files. I cut all the info from the OLD library file except for one song, which happens to have not been matched, nor uploaded, but still showed up from my Cloud library (kudos!).

Importing that one-song library does nothing. Apparently. Let's try a reboot.

Jul 6, 2020 12:55 PM in response to Snowdog212

The solution posted above by Snowdog212 is the correct solution and better than the one marked as the solution in this thread. For anyone in the future who experiences this problem, you may encounter an error when trying to open the "iTunes Library.itl" file. If it says something about connected devices, turn off home sharing and media sharing in system preferences, then reboot your computer. After that, the directions posted by Snowdog212 solved the problem.

JuliaGL

Level 1

4 points

Nov 12, 2019 8:40 AM in response to Orestes Chouchoulas

I just did it in that way and it worked, created a new file for each app, one for TV and one for Music from the original iTunes library. I have the Catalina 10.15.1

gregor59

Level 1

12 points

Jun 7, 2020 3:24 PM in response to gregor59

Found my answer here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250763617

I just copied my Artwork folder from inside APMArtwork, gave my machine and reboot, and there was all my art work :)

Oct 15, 2019 8:44 AM in response to turingtest2

I emptied trash every time, and the Music app generated a new Music folder each time.

I just noticed my iTunes folder structure looks different to my friend's. For example, mine has "iTunes Music" instead of "iTunes Media". Could that be an issue?

My library:

My friend's library:

Oct 16, 2019 1:28 PM in response to turingtest2

I also have a very similar issue...

1) Backed up iTunes folder to external drive

2) Wiped HD and installed Catalina from USB

3) Opened Music app and used import option to import all files from back up

4) Files no exist in Music/Media/Music folder

5) Turned off Sync Library option as I do not want to sync c. 200GB of music

Result is that my library just shows a few purchase from iTunes and not my library which h I can actually see on disc.

6) If I then also try to create a playlist and add a track it seems t try and re-download it to my Music library. I'm not sure why this has got so much more complex.

Oct 19, 2019 7:14 AM in response to turingtest2

Hi tt2, neither of these helped I'm afraid. No issue with permissions, and the same behaviour persists with previous iTunes libraries.

So I downgraded a spare MacBook to Mojave, copied my iTunes Library over, and opened iTunes. Everything worked fine, artwork, playlists, tracks were all present. I consolidated and organised that library on Mojave, just in case. Then I upgraded the MacBook to Catalina without reformatting. I launched the Music app, and no music was present. I quit and option-launched the Music app, navigated to the .itl, and again, no music was brought in, exactly the same behaviour as before.

There must be a significant bug that prevents Music from seeing/upgrading some iTunes libraries at all.

Oct 24, 2019 8:50 AM in response to chocojun

I submitted a bud report for this issue, linking to this discussion. Not sure how many people have a similar issue, but I suspect it would help to chime in on this thread if you are experiencing something similar and show that you are affected by the bug. From my testing, it looks like the fact that it was a clean installation did not matter.

Oct 30, 2019 11:35 AM in response to chocojun

Just as an update, I just installed 10.15.1, which, according to the release notes (see What's new in the updates for macOS Catalina - Apple Support), “improves reliability of migrating iTunes library databases into the Music, Podcasts, and TV apps”. Unfortunately this has no effect on my library. The previously described behaviour persists, the library cannot be imported.

Nov 1, 2019 1:45 PM in response to tim21i_dot

Sorry to hear, Tim. I had to update my phone today (which had parts of my library synced from Mojave), and all my synced music disappeared. So now I can't play any of my music anywhere. 😕 I'm not sure what it is about our Libraries that makes Catalina choke, but it's rather upsetting. Also hoping for a solution soon!

Nov 1, 2019 5:29 PM in response to Orestes Chouchoulas

Oh my, thanks for pointing this out! I also still have music from a previous sync on my phone and will therefore probably not update for the time being... This is heavily annoying and I can’t imagine that Apple wanted / wants it to be this way. Asking myself when someone official will reply...

MattB89

Level 1

4 points

Nov 24, 2019 2:10 PM in response to Orestes Chouchoulas

Thank you for your thread so far, it has been very useful trying to help me migrate into the Music app. Unfortunately I'm still a little stuck so hope you guys can help. I can get all my old playlists but it will not drag the music files themselves along and says it can't find them.

I have an old iTunes library folder structure from a windows PC from late 2017. (Ever since then I've been using Spotify and haven't really touched my iTunes as I haven't had a personal laptop.) I recently got a an old Mac from a family member so thought id import my old iTunes library into it but stupidly updated to Catalina before doing so.

I currently have a subfolder on my SD card which has a few files including:

SD Card/iTunes/iTunes Library.xml

SD Card/iTunes/iTunes Media/(hundreds of artists)

Even from a clean Music app (including bin emptied) if I point the directory at 'iTunes Media' and then import playlists it won't drag across the music but will take a load of empty playlists with an error message saying can't find songs.

Would you mind telling me your subfolder names, maybe its a simple misnaming?

Thank you,

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Import iTunes library into clean installation of Catalina