Restoring selected Mac music files but keeping playlists?

Check the location of your Music Media folder by looking at Music > Preferences > Files. The Automatically Add to Music folder will be generated inside the media folder, unless Music is prevented by incorrect permissions settings.

Apple Music content must be downloaded by the application. If you were to delete the .musiclibrary database and create a new one you would need to delete the Apple Music folder and then redownload any Apple Music content you want to be available locally.

Whatever the current issues are with your library it is probably better to work through them systematically rather than tear it all all down and hope for better luck when rebuilding it.

Regarding split albums

If iTunes shows multiple instances of an artist or an album then what generally works is to select all related tracks and use Get Info to add say a trailing X to each of the fields that the tracks should have in common:

• For an album; Album, Album Artist, and Artist (if artist is the same for all tracks) *
• For an artist; Album Artist (and Artist unless there are guest/featured artists listed which should not be changed)

Apply the change which merges things together, then remove the excess characters. Occasionally it may help to close and reopen iTunes between the two renaming operations. Part of a compilation should also be set consistently.

* If tracks are to be synced to a non-iOS device there should be a common Artist and/or the album should be set as a Compilation.

Use the songs view and display the fields Album, Sort Album, Album Artist, Sort Album Artist, Artist and Sort Artist side by side so you see whether or not it is appropriate to edit Artist and if sort values could be causing any further problems. See Grouping tracks into albums for more help if required.

One further tip for really stubborn duplicates. At one point I had three lots of Various Artists in the artists view of my iTunes Match library that wouldn't respond to the usual trailing X treatment. What I found worked was to add the trailing X to start with, but then with each group that iTunes wanted to keep separate start typing a value and let iTunes autocomplete from say Var... to Various Artists. Picking from the autocomplete lists seemed to work when pasting/editing the whole value didn't.

I find it helps to use the Column Browser option in the songs view. You can then quickly step though each album artist or album in the browser, stopping only when you see an obvious issue that needs fixing, such as a split or incomplete album. When you get bored of the process make a note of which album artist or album you got up to so you know where to start when you get back to it. If Music is keeping the contents of the media folder organized the file system should tidy up as you make changes to the metadata in Music.

tt2

Music isn't clever enough to notice if you start removing things by deleting files manually outside of the app. You might want to see https://dougscripts.com/itunes/2019/10/list-mias-v5-0/ as way of determining if you've created orphaned entries in the library that need cleaning up.

tt2