.m4a Files Not Playing in Apple Music

Question

.m4a Files Not Playing in Apple Music

I recently retired my 2009 Mac Pro and bought a 2018 Mac Mini. I have a few thousand albums on the old HDDs that were playing fine before, but now that I have copied them to the new Mac I seem to have lost most of my music library. As an example, an album that I imported from CD using Apple Lossless encoding will now only import and play two of the original thirteen tracks. The remaining files simply don't show in Music. Likewise, nothing happens if I right-click the actual m4a files in Finder and try to 'open with' Music, Quicktime, or Elmedia.

Interestingly, when I look at the file info for failing songs, the file size shows as expected (i.e. 20mb or so) but the 'size on disk' is only 4kb.

I have tried setting permissions to Read and Write, and selected for all enclosed contents, but this didn't help.

It seems strange that these files were all working fine on the old Mac, but are now having issues with the new one. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Mac mini, macOS 11.0

Posted on Nov 29, 2020 6:50 AM

Reply

Answer 1

CarlAVII

Community Specialist

Dec 6, 2020 2:32 PM in response to darrylfromcardiff

Hey there darrylfromcardiff,

Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities. We understand that you're missing music after attempting to transfer music over to your new Mac. We're happy to provide some assistance.

Let's follow the steps outlined in this helpful resource to make sure the files are imported to Music on your Mac:

Import music from a computer to Music on Mac

Check here on how you can view and change where your files are stored:

Change where your music files are stored on Mac

We hope this helps.

Have a great day!

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Answer 2

Sharon_419

Community Specialist

Dec 13, 2020 12:05 PM in response to darrylfromcardiff

Hey there darrylfromcardiff,

Thanks for the reply. Does this only occur with all songs that you downloaded from CDs? If this only occurs with specific group of songs, we may need to re-download those songs. Before doing so, let's follow the steps outlined in this helpful article under the "If you can’t play a song" section:

If you have problems playing music on Mac

Keep us posted.

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Answer 3

Dec 8, 2020 9:29 PM in response to CarlAVII

Thank for replying, CarlAVII

I followed these steps carefully during my first transfer and that was when I first noticed the corrupt files. They showed in iTunes, but wouldn't play. I have attached a screenshot to illustrate this. The file 'Sons Of Scotland' shows as 5.6MB, but only occupies 4KB on the disk. (This instance shows two versions of each file as I have begun re-importing my collection from CD.)

What is most confusing is that this is what I see when I access the content directly from the old HDD from my Mac Pro. The music was performing fine on that system. If I go into the music folder there, most of the files show '4KB on disk' and are unplayable. I'm wondering if this is some sort of anti-piracy feature Apple has built into the OS, or a way of encouraging users to subscribe to Apple Music. My music collection is legitimate and consists of content imported from CD or purchased from iTunes/Amazon. I shudder to think of how long it will take to re-import everything from CD, but am resigned to this now.

Thanks again, and have a great day as well!

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.m4a Files Not Playing in Apple Music

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