macOS Music library double item count and album-level genre issues
I’m having a persistent problem with Music on macOS and after nearly two weeks of troubleshooting, I’m hoping someone has encountered a similar issue.
MacOS Golden Gate 27.0; Apple Music subscription, with my library containing 57,000 tracks (a mix of Mix of Apple Music content and my own ripped/owned music stored on a QNAP NAS).
The same synced library on my iPhone/iOS is absolutely fine in all respects. On the Mac, however:
- Songs correctly shows around 57k tracks.
- Albums and Recently Added show around **113–114k items**, almost double.
- These are not visible duplicates — albums I check appear once with the correct number of tracks.
- All Playlists (possibly just the Smart ones) are duplicated exactly
- Most albums show old/incorrect Genre information in Albums/Recently Added even though the individual tracks have my correct edited Genre (it looks like the old genres are the Apple storefront ones). The correct genres also appear on iOS.
- Music spends a very long time on “Loading Cloud Library” whenever it starts.
- The issues occur with either the current musiclibrary.db file or any backups stored from before the problems began.
If I use the Mac library with Sync Library OFF, I see roughly 32k local/owned items and the problem isn't present. When Sync Library is enabled and the Apple Music/cloud content is incorporated, the problem returns.
An XML export contains approximately 57k tracks, not 113k which suggests the latter figure is a Music database/index/cloud representation problem rather than genuine duplicate tracks.
I have also tried creating a completely new Music library. The cloud content and historical metadata return, but my own tracks become Cloud Stream entries rather than being associated with their existing files on the QNAP. Re-adding those files creates duplicates with a new Date Added, so rebuilding the library is not a practical solution, as I want to maintain historical Date Added values.
Signing in and out of my Apple account, plus deauthorising/authorising do not fix the issue.
Has anyone seen this specific issue, or found a way to rebuild/repair the Mac-side Music database/cloud associations while preserving historical Date Added, ratings, play counts, playlists, edited metadata and links to the existing local files?
