Itunes match wants to download everything again after MacBook rebuild

mng70 wrote:

I have pointed the music media location to this.

Changing the media folder location tells the application where to put new downloads in future. It does not cause any discovery of content already in that location. Ideally you would have backed up the Music database before your rebuild, then restored it before running Music for the first time. It should have worked exactly as before. Assuming it is too late to recover a backup of the database at this stage sign out of iCloud Music Library (turn off Sync Library), import the media that is in your media folder, then turn on Sync Library once more. Your locally stored content should get matched up with the iCloud Music Library so you don't have to download everything.

The appearance of an additional Music folder between the named media folder and the artist folders is a legacy from iTunes where between iTunes 9 and 12 the default structure gave each type of media its own subfolder within the media folder. Prior to that artist folders would appear one level higher, mixed in with folders for Podcasts, Movies, TV Shows, etc.

tt2