Finding music application for new iMac (M4 chip

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

So what is the issue exactly?

Is it that you can't find the App on the new Mac as your title claims, or that you can's transfer the music over?

The app is the red icon on the Dock or in the Applications folder in Finder.

Where are you getting hung up exactly?

If you have your previous library you can load it into the music app by holding down the Shift key before you open it and selecting the iTunes Library.ituneslibrary file. Or the Music Library.musiclibrary file.

allenz wrote:

When Apple store migrated all my stuff the iTunes icon on the dock wasn't there.

I've had the same iMac since 2019 with a huge drive.

The iTunes application went away with macOS 10.15.* (Catalina), in favor of separate applications (Music, TV, Podcasts, Books), and iPhone/iPad/iPod management using the Finder.

That makes me think that you never upgraded the version of macOS installed on your 2019 iMac. That iMac shipped with macOS 10.14.4 (Mojave) and could be upgraded to macOS 15 (Sequoia).

Limnos wrote:

One caveat in that it may depend upon version separation interval. I tried doing this with a truly old iTunes library but my library was too old for Sequoia Music to interpret. It was unable to read the file (and no, it wasn't corrupted.) If we truly are referring to an "iTunes" version library, I believe there may only have been a limited period when the new "Music" application could open old"iTunes" libraries.

I ended up having to add the media files into the new Music and rebuild my playlists from scratch.

Same experience here, going from a copy of an iTunes Library that I used with High Sierra, to a Music Library that I created under Ventura (or possibly under Sequoia).

An extra "source of joy" was that Music seemed to have a rather nasty bug when importing songs from a directory tree that contains a lot of music. The symptoms were consistent with a buffer overflow bug, where Music created a big list of all of the individual subdirectories it had to examine, but silently truncated the list, leaving the imported Music Library full of major holes.

The OP's iTunes Library may not be big enough to trigger the bug, but I would advise the OP to keep at least one copy of the iTunes Library around until the Music and TV libraries have been successfully created, and appear to be complete - just in case.

One caveat in that it may depend upon version separation interval. I tried doing this with a truly old iTunes library but my library was too old for Sequoia Music to interpret. It was unable to read the file (and no, it wasn't corrupted.) If we truly are referring to an "iTunes" version library, I believe there may only have been a limited period when the new "Music" application could open old"iTunes" libraries.

I ended up having to add the media files into the new Music and rebuild my playlists from scratch.

allenz wrote:

I didn't know that. When Apple store migrated all my stuff the iTunes icon on the dock wasn't there.

I've had the same iMac since 2019 with a huge drive. This new M4 is olnly 512mb.

Perhaps you meant that your new M4 iMac has only 512 GB (512,000 MB) of SSD storage.

The 27" 2019 iMac came with "1, 2, or 3 TB Fusion Drive, or 256, 512 GB, 1, or 2 TB flash storage."

The 21.5" 2019 iMac came with "1 TB (5400-rpm SATA), 1 TB Fusion Drive, or 256, 512 GB, or 1 TB flash storage."

Unless you bought a 2019 iMac with 1 or 2 TB of flash storage (a SSD), you are comparing apples and oranges. Your new iMac may have only 512 GB of storage, but that storage is much faster than any hard disk or Fusion Drive.

Now I have to learn what I'm doping and how to do it. This new terminology also stumps me.

SSD?

SSD = solid-state drive, where your data is stored on flash chips. As opposed to a mechanical HDD (hard disk drive), where your data is stored on spinning platters, and the drive has to move arms around, and wait for the platters to spin into position to access data.

SSDs are a lot faster, especially for things like starting up your computer, or launching applications, where HDDs would be forced to jump around slowly a lot. They run quiet and fast.

But SSDs also tend to be smaller and to cost more per GB.

• SSDs are available In sizes up to roughly 8 TB. An 8 TB SSD might cost from $850 to $1500 or more.
• Desktop hard drives are available in sizes up to roughly 24 TB. A 24 TB internal hard drive mechanism might sell for $500 – $530, although you would then need to add a bit for a case, bringing the damage to ~$600.

Unified memory? EEKS!!

It means there is only one pool of RAM for everything. There is no separate graphics memory as with a discrete GPU. However, especially on higher-end Apple Silicon chips, there's a very high-speed connection between the System-on-Chip and the RAM that's designed to provide a lot of bandwidth to keep data flowing to and from the CPU cores, GPU cores, and other hardware processing engines.

The "integrated GPU" on a M4 Max chip might offer the sort of performance you could only get using a discrete GPU in the Intel world.

I managed to get mine all imported but sorting out the mess with the terrible new interface vs. old iTunes was so bad I just put it on the back shelf. There's a third party application that looks promising and I'll explore that when I have time to spend a month thoroughly vetting a trial.