My Music folder is cluttered by unnecessary files

Hello,



My Music folders are quite cluttered by a lot of files which I'm not sure what they're used for. Some are redundant, some are old (as you can see in the last opened column), and some appear to be mysterious backups?


See attached screenshot.


My questions:


• What are the files/folders that's for my music library within this mess? (And I mean music only, not TV, podcast, backups, or else)


• What files/folders can I safely delete to clean up the mess?


• Is it safe to drag whichever is the Music library file/folder to another location on my mac that will automatically sync with my cloud? I just want the files responsible for music, not for TV, Podcasts, backups or else.


Thank you very much for your help 🙏



MacBook Pro 13”, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jun 22, 2020 9:53 PM

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3 replies

Jun 22, 2020 10:20 PM in response to Megalo-XVII

When Apple decided to split up all the media apps in Catalina, they didn't exactly complete the transition IMHO. What you're seeing is the apps renamed and specialized, the libraries renamed and specialized, but all sort of lumped together. One solution that really helped me:


  1. make sure you close the TV app
  2. create a "TV" folder in your home directory
  3. create a "Media" folder in the new TV directory
  4. drag all video folders into the new Media folder - Automatically Add to TV, TV Shows, Movies and Home Videos
  5. drag the newly-made TV Library into the TV folder
  6. launch the TV app with option-click and it will ask you where the library is. Select the TV library file in the TV folder.


I created the same architecture with the <home>/Music folder so that it now contains only the Music Library and the Media folder, under which there's just:

  • Apple Music
  • Automatically Add to Music
  • Downloads-Music
  • Music (containing all my purchased content)


I found I could also remove all the "iTunes Library*" files, previous iTunes libraries -- really anything with "iTunes" in the name, once Music was up and running.


Podcasts, Mobile Applications are stored elsewhere now.


Album artwork is no longer stored in the iTunes directory, it's in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Music/_archive/Artwork. But you seem to have a lot of folders under Artwork that are not standard.


One caveat - be careful about moving your music content to an iCloud Drive unless you verify you have a LOT of storage there.


Hope that helps.

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My Music folder is cluttered by unnecessary files

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