Trouble moving Music (formerly iTunes) to a new external drive

Ah ****! Ok, perfect, I plugged the old drive in and went through the steps again and all is working well now! I made sure to unplug the old drive and test that I can still play songs and yep, I can. Thank you so much!!

So, two more questions:

• Do I also need to follow these steps with the movies and TV shows that are in that old iTunes folder? And there is also a Mobile Applications folder with all of my apps.

• Is it OK to delete that top-level iTunes folder on the new drive now that all the songs have been copied over to the Music folder on the same drive? Or at least the music files in there? There are still lots of things in there, like previous iTunes libraries and genius lyrics, and the old itl file, but Music copied all of the song files to the new location (~New HardDrive/Music/Media/) and if I can avoid having duplicates taking up close to 100GB I'd like to do that.

Ok, just walked through all of these steps but unfortunately Music doesn't recognize the songs (that weren't purchased through iTunes). I have hundreds of thousands of files, and I'm getting "The song 'X' could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" with an option to cancel or locate it.

Here's what my external drive looks like currently:

This is what I selected in Music > Preferences > Files > Reset

And this is what I did for Files > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate Files

After I clicked OK in the Organize Files menu, nothing happened. The menu went away, and Music didn't appear to be doing anything, which is why I assume it can't find my music files. :( But at no point during these steps did I do anything to indicate where all my media files are. I think I am missing that step somewhere, but I'm not sure where and how to tell it to find all those files in the iTunes folder.

Ahhh I should’ve known something was up since the original library was set up before iTunes changed to Music.

To clarify, are you saying I should copy everything from Old HardDrive onto my machine and then from there to New HardDrive?

“copy the folder ~/Music/Music to <New External>“ - where am I copying ~/Music/Music from?

Ok, so I did copy the ~/Music/Music folder from my user folder to New HardDrive. Now I have two folders on the drive with the following paths:

New HardDrive/Music/Music/Media/Automatically Add to Music/

New HardDrive/Music/Music/MusicLibrary

and

New HardDrive/iTunes/ which contains album artwork, genius files, and the iTunes.itl file.

Where do I drag the iTunes folder that contains all of my music files, iTunes metadata, etc.? Into the New HardDrive/Music/Music folder? To live next to the MusicLibrary file? And then option+open the Music app and let it consolidate? Or are you saying to keep the iTunes folder containing all of my data at the same root level as the /Music folder and when I open the Music app it'll organize all this itself?

To clarify, I tried option+open Music while the iTunes folder was at the same level as /Music/Music and I was again asked to choose the library and then prompted to save another folder called Music 1 back over on my machine's hard drive. I am looking to have everything housed on the external drive.

Thank you SO much! I can't tell you how helpful all this guidance was, and I really appreciate it. If Apple Discussions had something like Reddit gold I'd give it to you, haha.