Gigantic Library split over two locations

Use Music > Preferences > Files to set the media folder location to the folder containing your content on the RAID drive. You may be prompted to consolidate to that location when you set it, or you can do so via File > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate Files. This will create copies of the files that are currently on the local HD and update the library such that it points to the new copies. Once the process is complete you can manually clean up the old media folder location on the internal drive.

There is an advantage to having the .musiclibrary package in the same folder as the media folder as the library can then be easily cloned to another drive for security. Reading the library from a RAID location may be less efficient however, so there may not be any benefit in going through the steps to rearrange the library into this shape.

tt2

Hi.

It is possible I've missed something by not going back over the whole thread, but if you consolidate (File > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate Files - check the media folder is the right path on the RAID first) from the laptop (where everything plays correctly) to the media folder on the RAID then that should update the locations so that all items are on the RAID. Following this an exported XML version of the library should import into another library on another device, or you can simply copy the working library over to a same or newer version of macOS which will preserve date added. Also saves you manually locating 3,800 files in the library.

With that said, if you delete a track entry from the library that removes all references to that track from all playlists.

tt2

I suspect you're going to have to roll back everything, but try holding down option+cmd as you launch Music which opens it in its safe mode and does some internal consistency checks. If you're using a .musiclibrary restored from backup hold down option as you launch Music and explicitly chose the restored file in case the app is actually opening a cached copy of the library.

tt2

The aim of consolidating is to go through every track in the library and inspect its location. If it is within the currently designated media folder nothing happens. If outside the media folder a fresh copy of the file is made inside the media folder and the entry in the library is updated to point to the new copy. Were the multiple -54 errors or just one. Did the error occur immediately, or is there any indication to suggest some files were copied over and updated?

iTunes used to have a feature to consolidate selected files, which could be handy when trying to isolate particular files that were causing a problem. There is a script here - https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=mxrelocateselected - that sort of does the same thing, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to build artist and album folders automatically so isn't quite as useful as it might be.

If you're going to have to do everything manually then it should be possible to write something to process the XML data and fish out all of the locations from the rest of the data and pop them into say a CSV file, which could then be sorted to show the paths in order, which would simplify the search task somewhat.

tt2

Backup the .musiclibrary file before you start, and double-check the setting of the media folder.

tt2

Exactly, anything located outside the designated media folder is copied into it. Whatever is already there stays put. See Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community for some further background. The media folder would typically contain folders for each type of media, or some of those and all artist folders, depending on any previous history with different builds of iTunes. While manually moving things around on local HFS+/APFS drives should be OK I'd be wary of moving anything by hand on the RAID.

tt2

Whatever was done with locating or relocating those files, those files are being accessed remotely.

Whether you added that linkage without realizing, or some corruption thoughtfully added that?

First step is rebuilding the playlist.

Second is reviewing the 54,000 music files involved. (I keep my music library consolidated, so I don’t know if Get Info (in Music app) will show a local or remote location for a song. It might.)

turingtest2 wrote:

I'm not sure that duplicating it would work, but exporting the list as an XML file and then importing that should do it as only tracks that can be found get reimported. Yes, a much better approach.

Or export it and look at (or search) the XML, if taking that route. XML is a readable format.

File > Library > Export Playlist... Choose the XML format.

Rename the original copy of the playlist.

File > Library > Import Playlist... Select the exported file.

A new playlist with the old name will be generated, only tracks that can be physically located will be added to that list.

Drag and drop a selection of tracks from one list to a new empty list should also have the same result.

I've assumed the source list is a regular playlist. If it is a smart list then the second method will give you a regular list with validated tracks.

tt2

DHeckeler wrote:

I've never done this before. What should I be looking for in the XML file? Thank you!

XML is a text file, and is readable. Each field in an XML file is tagged, and related fields (such as each playlist entry) are nested.

Here is a hunk of the XML of an exported playlist, showing part of one track within the playlist:

<key>6842</key>
		<dict>
			<key>Track ID</key><integer>6842</integer>
			<key>Name</key><string>Espacio Sideral</string>
			<key>Artist</key><string>Jesse &#38; Joy</string>
			<key>Album Artist</key><string>Jesse &#38; Joy</string>
			<key>Composer</key><string>Jesse Huerta &#38; Joy Huerta</string>
			... {stuff here deleted } ... 
			<key>Apple Music</key><true/>
			<key>Location</key><string>file:///Users/mrhoffman/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/Apple%20Music/Compilations/Jesse%20&#38;%20Joy/03%20Espacio%20Sideral.m4p</string>
			<key>File Folder Count</key><integer>5</integer>
			<key>Library Folder Count</key><integer>1</integer>
		</dict>

Each track will have information containing the full file name of the file containing the music.

From a test XML created and exported here (from a consolidated music library, which means stuff isn't located all over), the file location info from the XML file looks like this:

<key>Location</key><string>file:///Users/mrhoffman/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/Apple%20Music/Compilations/Jesse%20&#38;%20Joy/03%20Espacio%20Sideral.m4p</string>

This location is a standard URL, like those that work with a web browser. (This uses standard URL encoding too, which means the %20 is a space, and &#38 is an & ampersand character.)

In this example, the file:/// means the location is a file, a colon and three slashes immediately following means no host name is specified; that the referenced location is local. If you see entries with a host name between the second and third slashes, that particular track is not located locally. It's on a file server or host somewhere, and that could conceivably be the local host accessed remotely.

An example of a remote file specification for a file served by the host fileserver.example.com looks like this:

file://fileserver.example.com/Users/mrhoffman {rest of path here}

You can use a search tool in your preferred editor, or a command-line tool such as grep, to search for just the location entries from the file, which will make this all less to look at.

The following is an example of using the grep tool available in zsh and other command line shells to search for the location entries for the tracks included in the playlist XML file named Jesse y Joy.xml :

% grep -i ">location<" "/Users/mrhoffman/Documents/Jesse y Joy.xml"
... {stuff expurated} ...
			<key>Location</key><string>file:///Users/mrhoffman/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/Apple%20Music/Compilations/Jesse%20&#38;%20Joy/03%20Espacio%20Sideral.m4p</string>
... {stuff expurated} ...
mrhoffman@cupertino ~ % 

There are quite probably better tools for managing enormous libraries too, or at least for reading and processing XML playlist files.

TL;DR: look for locations in the XML that don't include a string starting with file:///

I think I've already got a suitable tool for extracting data from XML files that runs in iTunes. I could probably rewrite it in AppleScript, or I could process the XML for you via an exchange of emails. My address can be found in my profile here if that appeals.

tt2

Ouch. I'd have skipped the renaming if asked. It probably renamed files according to the details set out in the iTunes Media Organization section of Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community, which in and of itself ought not to have had any impact on the content of the files. You can recover the state of the library from the Time Machine backup, but do you have a backup of the RAID as well?

tt2