How do I rebuild my Music library?

Hello Colin,

Thanks for that info and for choosing the Apple Support Communities. If we understand correctly, you are looking to remove duplicate songs on your Mac. Having an organized music library is important. We can understand why you'd be reaching out for a resolution.

We have a great resource which will actually help you remove duplicate songs. Check that out here: Find items and duplicates in Music on Mac

Cheers!

Depending on what you've done so far there could be multiple copies of the media files as well as multiple entries in the library. Deleting the library, creating a new one, and then importing your media file might not fix things, or you might lose ratings or playlists you want to keep. It somewhat depends on details that you've yet to share. Is the content you imported safe in a different location from the Music library and is there nothing else from the library that you need to preserve? In Catalina this is normally User/Music/Music. If so you could delete the lower level Music folder, empty the trash, and launch Music. It should create a new empty library for you into which you can try importing your media once more.

tt2

I presume you've copied some output from terminal, but it means nothing to me. The core of a Music library in Catalina will be the Music.musiclibrary database, normally found in /Users/<User>/Music/Music. Moving this or the media folder around within the same volume likely won't affect what you see when you open Music. macOS/OS X tends to keep track of files moved around on the same volume, so you may need to create a copy, then delete the original and empty the trash, if you want to prevent a previous version of your database from being accessed.

tt2

You can press and hold down option when starting Music to create a new library. The default location is /Users/<User>/Music/Music with the media folder at /Users/<User>/Music/Music/Media.

tt2

I hadn't previously considered it, but in iTunes a missing library that was at the standard path makes iTunes create a new empty library. In Catalina Music probably looks for an existing iTunes Library.itl file it can convert as it would do after an upgrade to Catalina.

tt2

Are there any playlists (.xml, .m3u, etc.) scattered through your media folder? These could potentially trigger duplicate entries in the library on import.

tt2

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2