Apple Music does not see music on external drive
We've had this problem since the switch from iTunes to Apple Music. We burned all of our CDs into iTunes on Windows about 18 years ago. Transitioned to an iMac - no problem with our iTunes library. Got a second Mac and put the music on an external USB drive to pass back and forth - again no problems. Upgraded the MacBook Pro OS to Catalina and BAM, Music broke. I pointed Music to the old iTunes folder and it recognized SOME of the music but not all. For the past few years I haven't done anything but make sure that Apple Music was pointed to the correct library on the external drive hoping that eventually it would fix itself. Now running Monterey (12.3.1) and tired of not having access to all the music.
Here is what we see:
- Apple Music sees about half the music when View--All Music is selected. Folders are organized by artist and then Album. Some entire artists are missing. Some artists are there but Albums are missing. (Missing from Apple Music - They all exist on the hard drive)
- Strangely, about half of those then disappear if I switch to View--Only Downloaded Music
- I can click on any song from the hard drive and play it. It opens in Apple Music and then shows in the list of Artists/Albums but only with that song - not the whole album. It shows as having been "recently Added" without any Cover Art.
- If I click on the iTunes store, it shows more of the music, most of which we burned from CDs rather than purchasing online, as "purchased" (but not all of it) with a little cloud which I assume means "Download".
- I do have some old .itl library files from before this was broken and from earlier versions of MacOS.
- All the old playlists have disappeared.
- We do not subscribe to Apple Music, iTunes Match, or have any music in the cloud to the best of our knowledge. We've never subscribed to any of that although it is possible that during some upgrade a free trial of Apple Music was accidentally "accepted". To be honest, I don't remember although I do have a recollection of making a copy of the iTunes folder before the initial upgrade and then copying it back after I was sure that an Apple Music subscription was not active.
How do I fix this?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.3