Old iTunes folder to Catalina or Big Sur Music.app

You're a legend. I have really weird files in my library too. And it worked.

Dear Matti,

Well done and appreciate your good work. Thank you for your lovely step by step post and that was extremely useful.

There are some errors on folder references that need to be addressed in step 5 & 8 which could lead to confusion to fresh users who were really scared to experiment.

Point 5 should be as follows:

5. Inside ~/Music/Music/ folder create a new "Media" folder, inside "iTunes Media" folder look for "Music" folder and move it to "Media" folder you just created.

Point 8 should be as follows:

8. Quit Music.app. Inside ~/Music/Music/iTune Media/ folder delete the "Automatically Add to iTunes" and "Automatically Add to Music" folders after verifying they are empty (a new "Automatically Add to Music" was created in step #7 in the Inside ~/Music/Music/Media folder).

Also wish there was similar tips on having the Audiobooks and TV/ Home videos shifted to respective new client softwares

Thank you for this support forum, it helped one on my new M1.

Regards

I don't know much about this stuff, but I had about the same problems some of you reported about missing songs during migration from a Mac running iTunes on OS 10.14 to the new Mac running Big Sur and Music App.  I would say that nearly half of my songs disappeared or could not be found and all of my playlists disappeared using Migration Assistant, which was also a disaster if you don't know not to copy System files.   There is, however, a time consuming but very straightforward means to make sure your entire iTunes library and playlist transfers, without going through iTunes Match or a Music account. .

1. Copy your iTunes folder to your computer, if not already there..
2. Navigate to Users/username/Music/Music/Media
3. When you open the Media folder, you will see a folder titled "Automatically Add to Music"
4. Drag your iTunes media folders to the "Automatically Add to Music."  This should start loading your entire library to Music.
5. If you had a failed migration as I did, you will have duplicates. Just go into your Songs library and use "Show Duplicates" and sort by date added.  Mostly, you can then delete the older files, many of which probably did not work when you first transferred them.  Just be careful you don't delete similarly named songs.

This does not bring over your playlists.  I did it the hard way and exported from iTunes each playlist as an XML file, sent them via Air Drop to my new Mac and then imported each one via Music.  I did not see a way to export or import multiple playlists. 

So far, this has worked perfectly for audio files, though I am sure something went wrong somewhere. . Some files (like video files, of course) do not transfer.  These appear in the "Not Added" subfolder.

I have 326 GB of music files (99% AIFF Ripped from CD's w/ XLD) that I needed to import/copy to a clean installation of Big Sur on an external SSD*.

• Open Music app for first time on clean macOS Big Sur installation and sign into iTunes Account.

• Try File > Import from internal Mac HD and TM ** ~Music/iTunes/iTunes Music. That does not work.

• Close Music app and copy all of the music files (folders) from internal Mac HD ~Music/iTunes/iTunes Music to external macOS SSD ~Music/Media/Music. Three plus hours later, none of the music files show up after opening Music app. I thought this worked in the past.

• Next, I selected all the music folders and moved them to ~Music/Media/Automatically Add to Music. Viola! Why didn't I do that in the first place, or drag to music window.

iTunes, and Music, have always been difficult when trying to access stored music from external drive, or just copy and set up with new macOS/iMac, and yet placing them in that last folder did exactly what I wanted it to do, but why didn't Import work?

*The reason for the external macOS SSD is because my internal Mac HD has had ongoing issues (mainly with long startup time) after updating from Catalina to Big Sur a year ago. I also recently tried macOS Recovery to Erase & Reinstall macOS Big Sur to fix the issue, which did work at first, but reverted back to the same problems as soon as I used Migration Assistant to transfer my User Account back. So now I'm slowly setting up the external SSD identical to my internal Mac HD from scratch.

Thank you!!!!

This worked beautifully, although I was importing mine from a Time Machine backup (had to navigated to the Latest folder, to get to my final iTunes library from a dead iMac).

The only thing different for me was at the start of step 8:

Quit Music.app.

I got a pop up "Saving Music library" that took about 5 min to manage 17.6 GB of music.

Album artwork from imported CDs is a little weird - some of it shows under Recently Added view, but doesn't show in the Albums or Songs view. Not going to sweat it.

Everything else proceeded as noted. Playlists, song count, play count all match.

Thank you for proposing this fix... I ran into a number of issues in converting my iTunes library to Apple to Music as prescribed.

My set-up was years in the making:

• 320GB of music, 25k+ songs (~9k unchecked)
• highest-quality album-art + lyrics added; 100's of playlists
• files reside in both iTunes Media and iTunes Music folders, ie. never consolidated

(iTunes pre-Big Sur worked fine without doing so; volume of files made consolidation via necessary file duplication undesirable)

I ran into the following issues

Step 4. Quit Music.app. Open “Music 1” folder created in step #2 and move "Music Library.musiclibrary" from it to the ~/Music/Music/ folder you renamed in step #1. Delete the temporary “Music 1” folder from the Desktop.

"Music Library.musiclibrary" didn't exist, only "Music Library."

(need to uncheck "hide the extension" box, now, however, the library detail never 'stuck' using this file; I had to keep going back to opening iTunes with the old .itl file to see the library)

5. Inside ~/Music/Music/ folder create a new "Media" folder, rename the old "iTunes Music" folder to "Music" and move it to "Media" folder you just created.

Done, but... it didn't pick up any of the files moved to the new "Media" folder. Due to my dual location set-up (?) it chose the default file location as the old

.../Music/Music/Music/iTunes Media; not ....Music/Music/Music/Media

(.itl library file also only found the /Music/Music/Music/iTunes Media; not the ....Music/Music/Music/Media)

As a result, I reversed step 5, trying to recreate the ...Music/Music/iTunes Music folder, but iTunes now can't locate those files.

I fear I'm going to have to unwind everything and start over; going through 'reorganise' the entire library didn't pick up the old "music" files either.

6. Option-start macOS 11.0 Big Sur Music.app and choose the newly created and moved ~/Music/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary as a library.

This continues not to work. Using the "Music Library.musiclibrary" file, as highlighted above, shows nothing. I had to keep going back to opening iTunes with the old .itl file to see the library.

In the end I had to unwind the attempt. Half the library was missing and I was still relying on the .itl library file. I will try again fresh, but having tried to consolidate the 25k+ songs via iTunes - which hasn't worked - I can't even consolidate the original iTunes folder and delete the legacy duplicates and use Big Sur this way... Hrumph.

Sorry, but this did not work for me. I am trying to import an old iTunes library/folder from MacOs 10.6.8. Perhaps this requires a different strategy? When I select the file you mention (iTunes Library.itl), I get the error message "iTunes Library.itl does not appear to be a valid library. Please choose another". Is my situation hopeless? Because I had to do a clean install of BigSur, I didn't have the opportunity to let the new OS convert the iTunes library. I'd appreciate your advice...

Thank you so much for testing this and sharing! I got a new MacBook with Big Sur and the Music app and was concerned I would loose a music collection it took years to collect.

I was running El Capitan on my old MacBook with my iTunes .itl file on my computer but the media files on an external hard drive. So around step 7 things got a bit different but I fumbled through and music.app was recognizing the files ok. Funnily enough it didn't find 140 of the 16,495 songs at first but after several hours of playing music and using the app with no other apparent background processes, it finally found the remaining files. Weird. I'll never know what files they were. None of it took an exceptional amount of time except processing the artwork.

If any one is wondering I tried the same process for my movies and home videos and the new TV.app using a copy of the ituneslibrary.itl file from my original iTunes library. The creation and swapping process for the TV library.tvlibrary file was the same as above.

Thanks again!

This didn’t work for me.

At Step 3 I get the rainbow wheel of death for over 4 hours (my library is very large - 180GB).

Is there any other way to ‘save’ the iTunes library I’ve been compiling for a decade?

Can I install an old version of iTunes on Big Sur and use that as my default program?

Any advice or help would be much appreciated

Oops. Sorry Apple, maybe I spoke out of turn. You just open 'Music' while holding down option and it asks you for the library file you want to use. And hey presto, there it all is. Will it work? Perhaps. Will report back. Certainly my playlists and recent additions seem to be there... It's OK Apple, I still love you. Even if you treat me bad.