Move or Copy Music Library (Catalina) to other MACs - Creates Issues

I was able to finally get this to work yesterday. Here is what I had to do in order to copy a Music App and TV App library

from my MacBook Pro (where I was happy with the artwork and everything) onto my iMac and get the exact same on the iMac along with all the artwork:

1) Copy /Users/<NAME>/Music folder from source Mac to destination Mac.

2) Copy /Users/<NAME>/Movies/TV folder from source Mac to same location on destination Mac.

3) Copy /Users/<NAME>/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data to same location on destination Mac.

4) Hold down Option Key on destination Mac and launch Music App.

5) Navigate to and select /Users/<NAME>/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.itl

6) Most (if not all) your artwork should now be showing.

7) Quit Music and restart Mac

8) Launch Music and it should run an update on the artwork and populate any possibly missing. If any remain missing after that you can delete them from your library and select the 'Move to Trash' option. Then drag them out of trash and re-import them back into Music and the missing artwork will appear.

9) (For missing artwork in TV app) Hold down Option key and Launch TV app on destination Mac

10) Navigate to /Users/<NAME>/Movies/TV and select TV Library

11) Quit and relaunch TV app.

Hope it helps

Not sure what did the trick but going from Catalina to Catalina I did the following with success:

• Copy the .musiclibrary file under music
• Copy the data under "/Users/[me]/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data"
• On the destination Mac hold down the [option] key while opening the Music app
• Chose "Choose Library..." and selected the copied .musiclibrary file
• Music opened and my music was there with (most of?) the tags but absolutely no cover
• I restarted my mac and "boom", there they were :D

Truth be told, before I decided to reboot my mac I did mess around with removing caches, removing (invisible) artwork, downloading new artwork but nothing gave me any satisfying result.. Last thing I tried, was copying the "com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data" which also didn't seem to do anything good... until I rebooted for some reason...

I hope this helps anybody trying to do the same move....

At the moment I can't find way to move music or tv library from Mac to another without losing preview and artwork. the images are stored in machine where the library has created and if you move to another Mac I can't find a way to recreate in the new machine. When you migrate from iTunes or added new file Music or Tv apps create preview in Mac library. If you move from one Mac to another no. Big bug! Has anyone has a solution? The only way is import file in a new library but information like stars and date added gone missing.....

The following migration works when migrating from old Mac running Mojave (MacA) to new Mac running Catalina (MacB) when the import fails. Assumes original location of music files is in /Sounds.

Summary:

• Copy /Sounds directory from old Mac to /Users/Sounds on new Mac
  • (Takes a while to copy the files over the network)
• Copy ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.itl from old Mac to new Mac
  • (replace / rename the existing iTunes Library.itl file)
• Create /Sounds symbolic link in root (see man synthetic.conf)

echo -e 'Sounds\tUsers/Sounds' | sudo tee -a /etc/synthetic.conf

• Reboot; check that /Sounds files are mounted
• Start iTunes and all files and metadata (play count) are back

Thank you!!! I was getting so frustrated because i had been only copying the Music data within the AMPArtworkAgent/Data folder and that wouldn't trigger the art work populating. But copying the entire Data file does. A million thanks.

That's because the metadata (counts, etc.) is held in the .ITL database. The XML is used when migrating.

If only Apple allowed the metadata to be exported...

Thanks a lot for trying and documenting your results here. I'm also disappointed that Apple didn't make syncing a music library between Macs or even importing an iTunes Library manually (rather than through the Catalina update process [I did a clean install]) into Music much simpler.

I've 14 years of iTunes files that have happily migrated across 5 Macs. I'm rather tied to my play counts, etc. This has always been located in the directory /Sounds and is now some 350Gb. I've never bought a single MP3/whatever from Apple; all of this is my own ripped music. Never particularly liked iTunes, but it worked OK, although was getting worse with each release as Apple pushes their streaming service, which like all streamers, is rent don't buy and is poorly curated and doesn't have all the music I have.

Then along comes the new 16" MacBook Pro which forces Catalina with it's new "can't use the /root directory" rules. The migration tool failed to work.

It's a simple requirement; copy /Sounds on old Mac to /somewhere/Sounds on new mac (don't want it in the Home directory). Alas it's failed every time due to the "binary" nature of the iTunes database file which can't be simply edited to relocate the files.

Have tried many techniques to move this massive directory from the old Mac to the new. I've managed to get the database to import to the new Mac, containing all the metadata (play count, etc.). Unfortunately the file locations (for 22,000 songs) are all incorrect: clicking on one results in the dialog "the original file can't be found, would you like to locate it", click Locate then navigate to the new location results in that SINGLE file being located, but it won't find any more, not even in that album. It's really not acceptable to do that for the other 21,999 songs.

I can import the entire library, but this looses the entire play count -- the point of the exercise -- so is unacceptable.

Now wondering if I can keep the /root location as a symbolic link.

That worked, thanks! One small amendment is that in step 3 one needs /Users/<NAME>/Library/Containers/....