New iMac M4 Sequoia 15.5 does not allow you to sync music from an external drive

2 things:

1. The Media location is only used for downloads. i.e for purchases from the iTunes Store or tracks and albums from the Apple Music subscription you download. And only does so for downloads starting from when you change it. It has no bearing on where the Music app looks for media files or your actual library beyond that.
2. If you have full iTunes Library on an external drive, what you want to do, is to shut down iTunes, and then hold the option key on your keyboard while you open it again. This should ask you to Choose an existing Library or create a new one. Click on choose a library, and navigate to wherever the iTunes library is stored, and click on the iTunes Library.ituneslibrary file. Doing this will cause the Music app to load your library again with all entries pointing to the external drive.
3. click here ➜ Move your iTunes library to a new computer - Apple Community

As I look at your pics, it appears that your Music app is directed to a Media Location that resides on a Time Machine external drive. This is not workable. The TM drive is read-only these days so Music cannot make necessary changes.

I suggest you Reset that location. The default location would be Home>Music.

Once done, you can restore your music collection from the Time Machine drive to its proper location on your startup drive, or if necessary, to another external drive if storage space on your new iMac is limited.

Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support

When you wish to import your music into the Music library, Apple's guidance is here:

Import music from a computer to Music on Mac - Apple Support

imnokid2 wrote:

where would I find Volumes using this new machine?

You do not directly access /Volumes using the Finder, the OS handles the mounting of external drives for you.

You just navigate the drives as usual in Finder.

All you should have to do is select the location you want in Music->Settings->Files:

The default is inside your home folder, as in the image below; click Change, navigate to the location in your external where your library is, and click Open. What in that process does not work?

Hi there, somewhat late to the party, but Phil0123 asked me to take a look at your issue so here I am. One thing that strikes me from the original images is that you had your media folder set one level too deep, pointing at ../iTunes Media/Music rather than ../iTunes Media as it should be. This can potentially cause an additional /Music folder to be created before you get to the artist folder level, and may confuse things when moving between iTunes and Music. See also Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community where I cover the standard layout of the Music library.

Regarding the Time Machine icon here is a quick YouTube link that shows how you might fix that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnSiJYLW8Jw. TLDR, delete the hidden .VolumeIcon from the drive, empty the trash, and the misleading icon should no longer show up.

This is my general boilerplate on fixing broken tracks:

The "missing file" issue with exclamation marks happens if the file is no longer where iTunes or Music expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, one of its parent folders, the drive it lives on has had a name change, or you've moved a non-portable library to a different path (see Make a split library portable for details). It is also possible that iTunes or Music have changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place, or that you've been too aggressive when deleting duplicates at some point.

Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Cmd-I to get Song Info, then click No when asked to try to locate the track. Look on the file tab for the location the library thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drives. Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, a folder renamed, or a drive label has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. If the difference between the two paths is an additional Music folder in one path then this is a layout issue. I can explain further if that is the case. If everything is where it is supposed to be try Repair security permissions for iTunes for Mac - Apple Community.

In some cases the library may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info, or when playing a track, but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. Although it says something like "use the same location" I think it expects to find the tracks in the same artist & album layout they were in previously, with one systematic change to the path.

<Edit> The library needs to be aware that multiple tracks are broken (though it doesn't need to be all of them) before it will offer to try to repair multiple broken tracks. Each time the app starts up it assumes that every track is going to be where it is expected to be, so you must make sure that several tracks are marked as missing before attempting this type of repair. </Edit>

If you want me to try to provide specific advice please post back the following details:

1. The location of the media folder under iTunes|Music > Preferences > Advanced
2. The location of a sample missing track shown under Song Info > File > Location that begins file://
3. The true path to the file whose details you gave in 2

See also FixLinks - an AppleScript to repair broken links in Music - Apple Community.

tt2

No, you just need to point them to the correct location and Music should do the rest.

Right click on a song, then select Get Info. It should attempt to find the song, if it can't it will ask you if you want to locate it, say yes and go find it once you do it this, it should ask if you would like it to use the same location for other songs. Say yes and it will attempt to extrapolate the location of other songs from that one.

The issue seems to be that your library is looking for the songs somewhere they're not, even though they are all on the external drive.

Basically you library was not consolidated and made portable, so location are not where it expects them to be. Even though the files are on the external drive.

What do you mean quit?

Did it not load the library?

Did it load successfully, but some tracks are still missing?

Did Music issue an error and stop the creation of the new library?

You need to be holding the option key, before you double click on the Music App's icon. This needs to happen in Finder, not from the Dock though.

I didn’t see where anybody mentioned this, but iTunes has been dead for years. When it was split apart and Music took over the music side of iTunes, all syncing is done in the Finder, not in the Music app.

if you want to see all the external drives connected to your Mac use Go > Computer in the Finder, but they should just be listed in the sidebar. It is possible to remove them from there, so in the open file dialogue when you’re searching for a place to locate your music folder use the go to folder, shortcut Cmd-shift-G and type /volumes.

Thank you for the screenshots, they do clarify the problem.

As D. I. Johnson said: the problem is not that it is an external drive. The problem is that this is Time Machine drive.

imnokid2 wrote:

Philo, thanx for your time.

"Right click on a song, then select Get Info. It should attempt to find the song, if it can't it will ask you if you want to locate it, say yes and go find it once you do it this, it should ask if you would like it to use the same location for other songs. Say yes and it will attempt to extrapolate the location of other songs from that one."

The songs are all there, but the pathway is not. If I click on a song, I get the would you like to locate message and I have to go to it in the external drive library. But there is no option to "find all". I would have to track every song, one at a time. There HAS to be a way to make this all happen at once.

There should be, if it's not offering to repair everything, your other option as mentioned by turingest2 is a script.

Thanks TT.

The icon in your screenshot represents a drive used for Time Machine:

Every external drive that you attach to a Mac will be mounted under /Volumes

The above example's path is

"/Volumes/Elements6/iTunes 1/iTunes Media/Music"