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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

Best 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

Jun 25, 2020 3:35 PM in response to Snowdog212

Thank you so much Snowdog212! This worked for me!

Jul 23, 2020 9:17 AM in response to Snowdog212

For me, Snowdog212 has succeeded where Apple Support failed. Thanks, whoever you are! Now I appear to have sorted out my music library, I've got to do the same thing with podcasts...

Aug 12, 2020 11:21 PM in response to Snowdog212

YES! You are the saving grace of 2020!

Import iTunes library into clean installation of Catalina