Transferring music to external drive.

Music is stored as individual. It is up to software such as iTunes, Music, or that in a TV or car to read the metadata (data about data) such as album, artist, track number, etc. and construct albums from songs with common properties. Some software might instead rely on folder structure, using the typical layout of artist folders containing album folders to allow you to navigate to a particular song. You said:

When I pull up detail on them it does not list album or artist.

Which is why I asked what format the songs are in. Tracks in .wav format don't have embedded metadata. Other audio formats usually do, although there are circumstances in which it can be missing. Are you seeing this issue in Finder, or in your Car or TV?

If you drag and drop from the Music app to a folder you get a flat collection of songs with no folder structure. You may be better off using Finder to copy individual artist or album folders to your drive. If the drive is big enough copying the entire library is the simplest option, and will preserve all of the structure. I notice you mentioned m3unify. My understanding is that this has options for choose how the copied files are set out, so I'm surprised it hasn't helped.

Another factor to consider for TV/car use is that you may have songs in formats that are not supported, and it may be easier if these aren't included on your thumb drive. That said you should still make a complete backup of your library somewhere.

tt2

What do you see under Music > Preferences > Files > Import Settings > Import Using? My guess is that you'll see WAV Encoder from what you've said so far. AAC or MP3 with 256K stereo bit rate may suit you better.

You can potentially convert existing tracks in your library to a new format which might be faster than ripping the discs again.

tt2

You said there were no tags, which is why I suspected .wav files. Files you copy to a thumb drive will still be exported as individual songs, but if the metadata is there then other software may be able to put them together as albums. Depending on where you want to use the files you may be prefer to create a similar folder structure to iTunes of artist folders containing album folder.

tt2

What format have you been ripping songs to? Tracks in .wav format don't have a tag, so no artist or album details are present.

tt2