How Do I Restore Music Information?

I am a bit confused. You mentioned that I "need to hold down Option while launching Music and then use the Choose Library option to open the restored file." That is what I am trying to do. But I cannot select the restored Library because of the message I get a message from Music (see below).

I have never merged my music with the Cloud. And only a small fraction of it is on my iPhone.

All of this music is still on my external hard drive. I can restore it by dragging it back into Music. But then I lose all the ratings and other information that I have maintained over the last 20 or so years.

I do appreciate your patience with all of this.

After I rebooted, I found I could change the music library just by turning WiFi off and on.

However, all I could ever do is start music, then I got an image that said it was loading the music library.

Given that I did not know how long it would take to load, I let it run overnight with no luck.

I then deleted the Music Preference files located in my Library, without any effect.

I then rebooted into the Recovery mode (Command-R) and did a disk repair on both virtual disks on my boot drive and that finally resulted in a successful start of Music and all my music (the files were never deleted) including ratings and categories have returned!

It took a lot of steps, but it looks like it is finally successful.

Thank you for your patience and all of your advice.

Another way to ask this, where is the file data information for Music stored? Since I restored the previous

Music Library.musiclibrary and this did not restore the data, I don't know where to look. My music files were not thrown out. Only the data about the files were.

With iTunes, it was possible to restore lost information by replacing the iTunesLibrary.itl and .xml files.

Thank you for this. I saw a similar post from you and looked for these files. I have looked under [username]/Library/ and did not see a 'Music' folder.

I also looked under the system/Library/ and did not see a Music folder.

I think I have invisible files selected to be visible as I see gray'ed out folders such as Library.

I have also done searches for the Music folder and come up with nothing relevant.

So I don't know where else to look.

Thanks again.

Thanks. I figured it would go to the same place and folder as the restored file. I guess it did not.

When I select the restored folder, I get this message. Now I just have to figure out what I need to do to make it happy. I have an iPhone and an iPad. I will try changing 'Cloud' and perhaps music sharing (or whatever) to see how to get around it.

Thank you for the suggestion. I have an iPad and an iPhone. I powered those down and that had no effect.

I also turned off WiFi on my Mac. That did not help.

Not sure if my wife's might also be counted. I will try powering all four down and see what happens. I forgot that AppleTV is also on the network, so that is five.

None of those are directly connected to the Library unless one counts syncing the iPhone to a smart playlist. I do sync my iPhone to the music to download music files. Perhaps going into the setup for the iPhone will clear this up? I will investigate.

Follow up: No, deselecting sync Music on iPhone did not clear the message.

None of the other devices have music files downloaded.

From here, when we get a chance, I will power down all five devices.

Your brilliant suggestion worked. I think it has.

I tried turning off WiFi before, but never rebooted.

But by turning off WiFi AND rebooting, I can now access a different library. However, the 'Loading Music Library' window has been going on for hours now. Not sure if it is just taking this long to load, or I am some sort of infinite loop. Will let you know.

Thanks for your patience and help.

Thanks for that clarification.

I did originally go to [username]/Music/Music and restored Music Library.musiclibrary from my TimeMachine backup. It did not restore anything.