Can I change the location of a song in Catalina Music?

Hello Howard,

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities! I understand that you'd like to correct the location where certain songs are stored on your Mac running macOS Catalina. The path for some music files also point to a copy of the song, instead of the original file. I would be happy to help with next steps to correct this.

The "Change where imported files are stored" section in the resource below will walk you through how to change the location for the songs. You may also want to follow the additional steps to consolidate your files in the Music folder after:

Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support

To find and remove duplicates of a song, follow these steps:

Find items and duplicates in Music on Mac - Apple Support

Cheers!

Hi, you've got a couple of things going on here, broken links to tracks, duplicates in the library, and in the media folder. I assume from the icons that you've also got an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription. One way of fixing the tracks that show with an exclamation mark is to right-click and use the remove download option. You can then either reimport your locally stored copy or download from the cloud. Doing this should preserve your play counts and ratings. Once every locally stored file is connected to the library you should have some that are marked as duplicates - see Identify cloud status icons in your music library on your Mac or PC - Apple Support. You should be able to sort by status and delete the duplicates along with their underlying files in the media folder. Finally turning keep organized off and on again should rename any files in your media folder that have a trailing 1 in their file name. Test the process with a single album's worth of tracks (remove downloads for broken links, import local files, eliminate maked duplicates, etc.) Assuming that behaves as I've described repeat with the rest of the library.

See also https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php - List MIA's, Super Remove Dead Tracks, Media Folder Files Not Added and similar scripts might prove useful when cleaning up the library. As always, start with a backup.

tt2

Really your media folder should be set to ~/Music/Music/Media and all of your artist folders ought to be in ~/Music/Music/Media/Music although making things work where there are is probably the best way to start. macOS will normally replace folders rather than merging them so moving things around by hand might make matters worse rather than better.

DRM protected Apple Music content from the Apple Music service ends up in <Media Folder>/Apple Music.

tt2

howardfromlafayette wrote:

So I should change the default in Music/Preferences/Files from /Macintosh HD/Users/HBrazee/Music to ~/Music/Music/Media ???

Possibly, although that might be premature right now.

Then Organize Files and see if all of my songs get moved to ~/Music/Music/Media/Music ?

Organize files only works on what is currently connected and inside the designated media folder. Consolidate files only works on what is currently connected and outside the media folder. You need to fix the broken links.

Leave it with me for a few hours and I'll see if I can cook up a script.

tt2

See FixLinks - an AppleScript to repair broken links in Music - Apple Community for the script. I've tested it by adding some tracks into an empty test library, copying the contents of the media folder to a higher folder, deleting what is in the media folder and emptying the trash, then selecting the tracks in Music, running the script, and pointing it at my higher level folder where the artist and compilations folders are. It should correctly predict the locations for a variety of media kinds, deals with missing artist or album values, and should make the same character substitutions that Music and iTunes do for

/ ? < > \ : * | " to underscore. MPEG-4 video can be linked if stored with either .mp4 or .m4v file extension and tracks with a trailing " 1" in the filename can be linked.

Test with a small sample to begin with, then try the rest if successful. If it fails to locate some of your broken content please supply some examples of the true path and the failed guess.

tt2

howardfromlafayette wrote:

I used the menu Music > Preferences > Files > Reset. That didn't take long, but I am not finding any change. There are albums in /music/ that are not in /music/music/ There is a /music/media which only contains an empty folder called "Automatically Add to Music.localized". There is not a /music/music/music media file.

My "Music Library.musiclibrary" is in /music/.

OK, that is a misunderstanding on my part. It puts your library one layer higher than it would normally be, although in principle in the right shape.

then tried File > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate Files. I checked both "Consolidate files" and "Reorganize the files in the folder "Media", which has been greyed out in the past. This process took a couple of minutes.

Now it looks as though the albums from /music/music/ are now in /music/media/, although the first album that I looked at now has a 1.m4a duplicate that it didn't have before.

But none of the albums from /music/ are there.

OK, now I'm confused. Have you resolved all the broken links yet? Is there content in your media folder that isn't connected to the library? You might still get the odd "* 1.,4a" file if there are unresolved duplicates.

tt2

I guess that method no longer works then. 😕

You could try List MIAs.

tt2