How do I know which "music library.musiclibrary" is being used right now?

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Level 1

74 points

How do I know which "music library.musiclibrary" is being used right now?

I have searched my mac for files with the file extension '.musiclibrary' and there are 12 results. Several of them are 2k in size, but others range from 1mb through to 16mb.

I want to know which one of these my current music library is. The "date last opened" column in my search results just says "-" on all of them. Wonderful.

I do know that some of my music is on my internal drive, some is on a ssd, and some is on a spinning disk, and some is on a mounted network drive. That side of the library is all over the place, but I don't care about the files, I care about the music library itself..

I want to clean up my library by making a copy of the CURRENT library, then opening the copy (e.g. option-clicking music to select the copy of the current library).

How can I tell which exact musiclibrary file the Music app is working with when I launch it?

Mac mini, macOS 13.4

Posted on Jul 19, 2023 2:26 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Tim St.Clair Author

Level 1

74 points

Aug 16, 2023 9:37 PM in response to turingtest2

So I did actually eventually find out how to find out the "current" musiclibrary that was in use, and it wasn't the file date.

I opened up Activity Monitor and selected Music from the list, then pressed the 'i' button on the toolbar. This brought up a window with useless information on it, but on the last tab 'Open Files and Ports' was a path showing the file name 'music library.musiclibarary', and that was the one that was the current one.

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

274,147 points

Jul 21, 2023 11:05 AM in response to Tim St.Clair

It will be the one with the most recent modification date. Anything you do in Music should update it. Music always opens the last library that it opened unless you use the option-start-Music method to choose or create a different one.

See also Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community.

tt2

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Answer 3

Ntonal

Level 1

12 points

Dec 9, 2023 7:53 AM in response to Tim St.Clair

@Tim St.Clair,

Thanks for the follow up. This saved me a call to Apple Support as I was looking for this very information.

I had to scroll down to the bottom of a long list of info after clicking on 'Open Files and Ports' and found it there. I'd actually buried it in my old iTunes folder to differentiate it from the other versions.

@turingtest2 is also correct in stating that "It will be the one with the most recent modification date." I was able to see that when viewing the file individually. However, when I did a search for the Music Library.musiclibrary file, it showed the results but the date was blank as Tim mentioned? Is there a way to get the results of the "Date Last Opened" showing?

Thanks!

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How do I know which "music library.musiclibrary" is being used right now?

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