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Several of my music files have been completely stripped of the songs I've added over the years. The file name still appears, but all my chosen songs have disappeared! They don't appear in the recycle bin. Is there a way to recover the music I had chosen for the files? I haven't changed any settings - all my apple devices are synced and all are showing the same files to now be empty of music. Please help!!!
Kim
iMac (M1, 2021)
A playlist is normally a list of references to files in the library, although with a subscription to Apple Music it is also possible to have list that reference tracks in the Apple Music collection without them being attached to the library. Without knowing when the tracks went missing from this list, or whether they were and still are part of your library, it is hard to know if the list can be recovered. If you have Time Machine backing up your library you can potentially go offline. Restore a copy of an older version of your Music Library.musiclibrary database, and use the option-start-Music method to connect to it, export the playlist as it used to be, reconnect to the active database and the Internet, and then import the exported list. This is only going to work if the items in the list are locally stored tracks that are still in your computer.
tt2
A playlist is normally a list of references to files in the library, although with a subscription to Apple Music it is also possible to have list that reference tracks in the Apple Music collection without them being attached to the library. Without knowing when the tracks went missing from this list, or whether they were and still are part of your library, it is hard to know if the list can be recovered. If you have Time Machine backing up your library you can potentially go offline. Restore a copy of an older version of your Music Library.musiclibrary database, and use the option-start-Music method to connect to it, export the playlist as it used to be, reconnect to the active database and the Internet, and then import the exported list. This is only going to work if the items in the list are locally stored tracks that are still in your computer.
tt2
If by "music file" you mean a Music Library.musiclibrary package then how are you opening these? If you simply double-click on one of these in Finder then Music launches, but it opens the last library that was opened while holding down option as Music is launched and then choosing or creating a library. You need to use this process to switch from one library to another. See Switch libraries with the Apple Music app in macOS - Apple Support.
tt2
Hi there, thank you so much for your reply. Sorry but I didn’t explain very well.
We simply went to some of the files that we created through Apple Music App and they were empty. The files were still there but were empty. Photo attached of one of them.
Excellent. Thank you so much for the information. That looks like it will restore the library back to how it was hopefully. We will try this over the coming weekend.
thanks for taking the time to understand and reply.
AnK
You're welcome. Best of luck with the recovery efforts. 🙂
tt2
Songs stripped out of music files
