Music hangs on Saving Music Library

This is a fresh, new machine with minimal software installed and definitely no third-party security software. No .tmp files. There is a 'sentinel' file that gets created when Music.app is launched.

I've tried running "sudo fs_usage -f pathname Music" from cmd line to see what files it's opening/reading/closing, as well as doing. I've run find to dump all files in the library to a textfile, and then 30 minutes later do it again to see if anything changed. Which it hasn't. (I also used this procedure to confirm that when experimenting with checking and unchecking Keep Files Organized that I can see what it was doing... and that's how I know it was actually renaming all the files to have the track number in front of them.

But something is keeping the library database from being written to.

I have even tried creating a new account, and making a fresh copy of the music library, and loading it in, and it still hangs on exit, infinitely showing "Saving Music Library". OK maybe not infinite, I'll let it go for a much longer while and let you know. But it's already been going 30 minutes.

Edit: While it's saving, I'm running 'sudo lsof | grep XXX' where XXX is the PID of the Music app. I'm looking for changes, and nothing is changing. And looking at the mod times for all those open files from the Music app, none of the mod times have changed since I initially selected quit on the Music.app. (It's been an hour...) Even the timestamp on the sentinel file is old, but not as old as the timestamp on Library.musicdb

Correct. this is happening when Music on Ventura attempts to update a Music library originally created in Catalina

lsof is a command line tool to show all open files, by process ID. It's useful for debugging and to see what files a program is changing/updating. (It's basically the same thing as showing open files from Activity Monitor when you get more info on a process).

I tried the option-start-Music as well, same results.

If I open the library, and don't do anything, if will close and NOT hang.

But if you play a file (which seems to rename it to the '01 Title' format from just 'Title' based on changes to the file system I see), it will hang on closing again.

I also confirmed that everything has read/write access.

So when I open it in safe mode, and click on a file, it will sometime play. Othertimes, another song than I click plays, and if I click the original again, it will play. BUT when I look at the file system to see what has changed, I see the file I clicked that didn't play at first and then played the 2nd time has been renamed to the "01 Name" format. And on top of that, in safe mode, it closes quickly. (Safe Mode still takes about 5 or so minutes to load the library).

What all does safe mode do that might change this behavior? I shouldn't have any plugins (it's a fresh install).

My ned step is doing the "Uncheck Keep Files Organized" routing and then re-checking it, which will make it re-org the whole library IN SAFE MODE to see if that fixes things. It takes about 90 minutes to do this, so I'll update later today.

One more thing to add. This library goes back a long way. When iTunes 8 came out and removed the option of not including the track number in the file name, there was a way do disable it this way:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes create-filenames-with-tracknumber -bool FALSE

That seems to be carried over into Catalina/Music with 'addTrackNumber'

defaults read com.apple.music   addTrackNumber
0

Apparently now, versions post Catalina no longer respected this setting.

In Safe Mode, it took over an hour for Music to "keep files organized", but now when I got to quit, it hangs again.

I did confirm by scanning the file system that it did rename everything at the file system level. Historically, if I force quit now, and restart, the library will be pointing to the old, pre-renamed files.

So unfortunately, that hasn't fixed it. The .musicdb isn't getting updated.

I'll let it continue to run overnight on the off chance something changes.

I've been saving "Samples" of the process from Activity Monitor, and will submit those with a big report to Apple.

@turingtest2 do you know of any tools to let you dump (or ever write to) the .misicdb database?

Thanks for the offer, but I have actually done all you suggest before. Problem first discovered when moving to Monterey (and tested on brand new machine / clean install).

One thing I didn't try yet is converting on a Big Sur machine. The other thing I'll try is moving it to a new virgin Catalina install on another machine, and confirming has the normal 'addTrackNumber' preference setting and doing the force music library organization there.

(By the way, for those following along at home, after 24 hours the Ventura machine was still stuck on the "Saving Music Library" alert)

I'll keep everyone posted to what I discover.

I thought I found the culprit: I was able to open the library and before saving, turned off "Keep Music Folder Organized". At that point, it seems to be able to quit properly. However the next time I launched it, the Keep Files Organized got turned on again somehow, and as I played songs, it renamed them. And after doing that with about 25 songs, when I now quit, it hangs again.

So I loaded a fresh clone of the original library again, opened it, turned off "Keep Music Folder Organized" again, played some files to let them update the last played times in the database, then quit. AND IT HANGS again.

So something is causing a hang when the database changes and it seems tied to the Music Library database being on an external drive.

The external drive is APFS SSD. But I've also had the same issue when copying the library to the internal drive on the Ventura machine as well... but I just did a test which I copied the library into a new location on the internal SSD and opened that via the Command-Open option to select the library. Made sure Keep Library Organized was unchecked, played a few songs to get their last played time set, and it seemed to work. Quitting was fast, opening was slow like normal but after that worked ok.

So now I'm setting back on the Keep Music Folder organized, it took over an hour to do that. I took a look at the file system to confirm the files have been renamed with the leading track number. And they play properly, etc. So now comes the final test: quitting. And so far, after 25 minutes, it's still saving.

This part "the automatic file renaming and organising" seems to be the key.

I spent many hours yesterday working on this, and still haven't found a reliable solution; but I think the root cause of the problems were due to having 2 similar files that only had a difference I the case of their names, on a normal, case-insensitive file system. Keep Folder Organized would overwrite files in an album name folder if the case was the only thing different.

And because the filenames are Unicode, that makes doing checks for case a bit harder.

Your NAS probably uses a case-sensitive file system. APFS and HFS+ default to non-case-sensitive.

But this definitely seems like a big in Music.app that's causing this hang.

I thought I solved this, and it seemed to work, until I quit it and restarted; then the files got lost again.

Here's what I did that I thought finally fixed things:

1. Made a clone of the original media library on a blank APFS case-insensitive hard drive. (Same as the original on Catalina).

2. Copies the (Catalina) Music Library database (with a new name) to that filesystem as well.

3. Plug that disk into a Monterey machine, opened with Command to choose a new library, and selected the library. This takes a couple minutes to load.

3a. Make sure "Keep Library Organized" is turned off.

4. Music -> Preferences -> Files and change the Media Folder Location to a new folder on a second, empty 4TB SSD. DO NOT CHECK "Keep Media Folder Organized"

5. Spot check your library by playing a few tracks. I did Cmd-I Get Info, under the File tab check the location to confirm that they were on the disk I started with.

6. File -> Library -> Organize Library. Check Consolidate Files. Press OK, cross your fingers and wait a very long time. (At least it will give you a dialog listing all the files it is copying to the new disk). This took about 12 hours for 3TB and 275k tracks.

7. Come back many hours later. Spot check some files via Command-I Get Info -> File Tab and confirm the location in the new disk.

8. Quit Music.app and cross your fingers.

But I'm not sure why when I re-opened things the 2nd or 3rd time that the library database lost track of files again. It's like something was getting cached somewhere, and the cache was outdated.

Today, I have tracked down another Catalina machine to experiment with. I'll report back hopefully tomorrow what I learn. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯