Storing Music files on iCloud Drive

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Storing Music files on iCloud Drive

Has anyone moved their Music folder to iCloud Drive? My new Laptop doesn't have enough hard drive space to move it there with Migration Assistant.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.7

Posted on Apr 11, 2023 4:22 PM

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Answer 1

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turingtest2

Level 10

278,455 points

Apr 14, 2023 6:40 AM in response to Haystack Chad

The Music and iTunes apps are not designed to play nicely with content stored in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive etc. Particularly if you want that content stored in the cloud rather than locally. Apple have iTunes Match and Apple Music subscriptions to sell you if you'd like to offload your music library to the cloud. If you have an Apple Music subscription you can select portions of your library, right-click, and use Remove Download to free up local storage. I would however advise that you backup all of your locally stored media to an external drive or NAS just in case you discover that the matched version in Apple Music isn't quite what you expect (e.g. clean vs. explicit) or you forget to redownload everything from the cloud before allowing your subscription to lapse.

tt2

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Answer 2

Apr 12, 2023 10:39 AM in response to Haystack Chad

To clarify I am subscriber to Apple Music and I sync all my devices to iCloud Music. I have an (old)MacBook Pro 512GB that I am trying to replace with a (new) Mac Book Air 256GB. I tried to move the files with Migration Assistant but I don’t have enough space on the new computer to move the large(~175GB)Music folder. It contains my iTunes Music folder and it also has Garage Band And Logic Pro files in it.

I have iCloud+ with most of the 2TB available on my iCloud Drive so I thought why not move it there like my documents and Desktop folders to access from all my devices. I went to the instructions for moving the music folder but it says that it is not recommended to move it.

It has mp3/mp4 music files going back to the 90s (some can be deleted but not all) and some of it is not available on Apple Music to re-download. It has to go somewhere as it has music from iTunes and also has the other music files from other programs.

I have two 1TB USB drives and a Synology 8TB NAS drive that is not set-up yet. I could move the folder itself to one of the drives or separate the files from different apps and move them out separately. There is more than one option here but I am trying to find the best one with fewest possible problems.

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Storing Music files on iCloud Drive

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