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Level 1

8 points

Catalina OS still crashing iTunes library on iMacs?

In the fall of '19, I tried upgrading my iMac operating system from Mojave to Catalina. It ended up 1) stripping off my album art, 2) refusing to let me reload album art & 3) ultimately causing my entire iMac to crash. After two-three weeks of hassling with the issue with both Apple store staff and Apple on-line support, I ended up having to wipe my entire system and reload the Mojave OS.

My on-system iTunes library is around 10,000 albums (no iCloud storage for this old fart). So you can imagine what a joy it was to reload that library from an off system hard drive. The one good that came out of it was I really got to understand how to use the Album Info Edit function (and accordingly organize the library properly in alphabetic fashion). So you can imagine my reluctance to message with it again.

At the time of the '19 Catalina Catastrophe, the Apple Store tech advised me to never upgrade to Catalina. However I am finding out that in the near future some programs are going to require that iMacs use Catalina (TurboTax for one). So my question is:

Is it safe to upload the Catalina operating system now? I really don't want to destroy my library again.

Posted on Jan 31, 2021 6:05 PM

Best reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,830 points

Posted on Feb 1, 2021 6:54 AM

I had no problems with my iTunes library when I upgraded to Catalina, so I'm not sure what caused your problems.

Is it a referenced library (leave music files in place), or did you allow it to copy all items into the media folder and organize the files itself?

Make a backup of the iTunes folder which contains the iTunes Library, the media folder, and the artwork folder. If the conversion to Music goes poorly, you can restore that backup and try to convert again.

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Catalina OS still crashing iTunes library on iMacs?

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