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shadow2350 Author

Level 1

15 points

Music Disappeared

I am using Big Sur, version 11.6 on a late 2015 Mac. I went into Apple Music and 75% of my music has disappeared. I can see the album and the list of songs in Music, but there is to the left of each song a circled exclamation mark. When I click on a song, I get a popup window that says the song cannot be found and asks if I wish to locate the song manually. I cannot locate the albums or songs in Finder.

I do subscribe to Apple Match. All my music was uploaded to it some years ago while hard copies remained on the hard drive of the Mac. After I hit cancel on the popup, the song starts to play. I can click a grayed out circle around an arrow in the upper right corner of the screen to download the song although I'm not sure where the song is coming from. After downloading the song, the song seems to be permanent--at this point.

I cannot go through this process for over 10,000 songs (I have a lot of CDs). What happened to my music? Where are these downloaded songs coming from and where are they being stored on my computer? How can I get things back to the way they were? Any thoughts?

Mike

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Nov 13, 2021 5:46 PM

Top-ranking reply

turingtest2

Level 10

274,910 points

Posted on Nov 20, 2021 6:36 PM

You can select tracks that are in the cloud, right-click, and click download from the context menu to download them. With tracks with broken links that you know to be in the cloud you can use the same menu to first remove the download and then download to fetch a new local copy. If these were matched tracks they might not be absolutely identical to your originals, so you may want to try to repair when you do have the originals. Something else you can try since you have iCloud Music Library is to import the whole of your media folder to the library. Tracks that Music already knows by path will be ignored. Any duplicates with existing cloud items should resolve down to a single entry. True duplicates should be marked as such (see Identify cloud status icons in your music library on your Mac or PC - Apple Support) and can be tidied up later.

tt2

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Music Disappeared

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