files missing
I have all my music files stored on an external hard drive (about 100 GB). This was connected to my MacBook Pro and I was listening to this music library on the Music app.
At some point this stopped playing and the song files in the Music app had an exclamation next to them as in missing location. I looked on Finder and the external hard drive was still mounted and whilst the Folders and Folder structure was still all there the audio files were all missing with the album folders appearing empty.
Doing Get Info on the top level folder appeared to show the size of the folder and data still being correct. Also if I did a spotlight search for a song then the mp3 file appeared when searching for it it and I could still play the audio file. Yet I couldn't see the files in Finder and iTunes/Music app couldn't locate the files. This seem to happen suddenly and the external hard drive has been fine before. Other files on the external hard drive in a top level different folder (i.e. images) I can still view so it appears to be just be my music library.
Any suggestions on how to get them to appear in Finder and Music again? The external hard drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.4