large music collection Music app and tag fields

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Level 3

812 points

large music collection Music app and tag fields

i have a relatively large collection of albums and songs. invested over the years and the majority of it is unprotected aac and some mp3 as well as aiff files.

i spent a lot of time organizing, sorting, renaming and redoing tag info for the music collection in order to line it up with my plex media server.

but i also want to sync the collection to my ios devices so i have it imported into the macOS Music library.

in short, after i am done tagging and organizing everything, i want to lock all the media content as read only files (every song file), to prevent unintentional or unacknowledged changes to tag info.

i have noticed over the years that several useless tag fields are present in older music files, many of them starting with “ITUNES…”, url fields, copyright fields, etc. mostly junk !

if i make all my music files read only will i have issues in the Music app with playback ?

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.3

Posted on Apr 20, 2022 10:17 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

turingtest2

Level 10

273,115 points

Apr 21, 2022 11:09 AM in response to zero7404

Yes, I've just set an album folder to read only for all accounts and applied the changes to enclosed items. The tracks play just fine. In my case it was just my personal account that I needed to edit but you'd do well to take note of the existing settings before making changes so you can undo them you want to update any details.

tt2

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Answer 2

Apr 21, 2022 4:04 AM in response to turingtest2

Hi turingtest2, can you please share your music library app (paths to files etc) again please. I tried to view it from 10 years ago but no not available. I have been moving my music files around after a reinstall - actually sorted Music out completely before the reinstall but they have gone all over the place again as TM wouldn't allow me to migrate it - (think there was a bug in the system!). So I now have a music folder where there is my iTunes library and then a media folder, inside media folder I have duplicates of albums etc, and even another folder called Music that just creates itself. I have tried moving the contents back to median but it won't have it.. Hope you can help!

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Answer 3

turingtest2

Level 10

273,115 points

Apr 21, 2022 4:17 AM in response to Stressed Mum

The default location for the Music library is ~/Music/Music, with the media folder as ~/Music/Music/Media. A legacy from iTunes is the additional Music folder inside the media folder, which makes less sense now given that Music only holds one type of media. To stop Music creating this additional folder use a text editor to open the hidden file .Media Preferences.plist in the media folder (reveal with shift-cmd-period) and change this line:

to:

Once saved launch Music. If you're happy to let Music organize files turn Keep organized off and back on again, otherwise move the artist folders up one level manually and hope Music keeps track of them, which it should as long as everything is on the same volume.

tt2

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Answer 4

Apr 21, 2022 10:05 AM in response to turingtest2

Thanks again - definitely works - once I move the folders to the right place they stay there - then have to do similar as above to flag them or lock them so I know then I can delete any 'stray' folders in the archives! What a job!!

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Answer 5

zero7404 Author

Level 3

812 points

Apr 21, 2022 8:46 PM in response to turingtest2

that should ease up my fears of apple software changes down the pipeline for the user base - you know the changes that you don’t immediately notice that go unannounced. you notice them later on and by then any snapshot backups you had before a key software update … are long gone.

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