Music.app messed up the data of my entire music library — help!

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Music.app messed up the data of my entire music library — help!

The Music.app (v1.0.4.104) application that replaced iTunes on my iMac has gone totally berserk. Suddenly, the artist name, album title and genre of all 4,316 songs (from more than 350 albums, mostly transferred from my CDs) are the same. Has anyone out there encountered this before? I don't know what happened, but any ideas of how I can get everything back to the way it was will be most appreciated. Needless to say, I would rather not have to manually correct all this data album by album. As bloated and problematic as it could sometimes be, even iTunes never did anything like this. My Mac is running Catalina (v10.15.4). Thank you.

iMac 21.5", macOS 10.15

Posted on Apr 18, 2020 11:44 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

brenden dv

Community Specialist

May 3, 2020 9:47 AM in response to stejones

Hi stejones,

Thank you for reaching back out to Apple Support Communities.

Have you tried restoring from a backup? If you were using Time Machine to backup, you could follow the steps here to Restore your Mac from a backup - Apple Support

If you need further assistance after restoring from a backup, reach out Apple Support directly here: Get Support

Best Regards!

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Answer 2

Lori_G7

Community Specialist

Apr 20, 2020 1:18 PM in response to stejones

Hi stejones,

Thank you for reaching out to Apple Support Communities. I see from your post that you are having an issue with Music app messing up the data of your songs. I want to help! Are you an Apple Music Member? Are all the affected songs ones that were transferred from CD's or are any purchased from iTunes? Did you back up your Mac before upgrading? Have you tried to restore from a Time-Machine backup for this issue?

To make sure that you are looking at all the information about the Music app, this article has more information about using the Music app in Catalina: What happened to iTunes? - Apple Support

Hope that helps. Reach out with any questions.

Best Wishes.

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Answer 3

stejones Author

Level 1

10 points

Apr 30, 2020 7:09 AM in response to Lori_G7

Thanks for replying. To answer your questions:

• I am NOT an Apple Music member.

• Although the vast majority of the songs in my music library came from CDs, the problem has affected all songs, including ones I have purchased from iTunes over the years.

• I back up my iMac every night, albeit not with Time Machine. I back up with SuperDuper (a clone of my Mac's hard drive) and offsite to Backblaze.

I have tried rebooting from my clone drive without success. To preserve my old Music/iTunes files, however, I have temporarily paused backups so the old files are not overwritten. Hence, the Music/iTunes files from before everything got messed up are intact, I just don't know what to do with them. Nor have I played any music in the Music app since this occurred.

I appreciate any suggestions you can offer to help me resolve this issue.

Thanks again,

Steve

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Answer 4

stejones Author

Level 1

10 points

May 10, 2020 8:22 AM in response to brenden dv

Although I was not using Time Machine, I back up everything to two other sources, one a clone (using SuperDuper) at home and another offline (using BackBlaze), so I still can retrieve backed-up files. I just don't know exactly which files I need to replace to bring my Music library back to the way it was before things got messed up. That's what I need to know. Can you help me with that?

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Music.app messed up the data of my entire music library — help!

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