Apple Music has a number of issues after updating to Sonoma 14

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Apple Music has a number of issues after updating to Sonoma 14

After updating to Sonoma I now have a lot of problems. I have a large collection of music that I have locally that is kept on an external hard drive. This has never been a problem with the past version of OS but since updated, I had to change where the files were located under preferences. For some reason after updating it didn't preserve those settings. After changing that I thought all was well, but not the case. I would attempt to play files and some would work fine while others didn't play at all. I checked info and found that the music file no longer was in the folder. In fact, all of the music was gone from the artist folder. Since I keep a backup, I copied the missing files back into music. I then checked the external drive to make sure that music copied the files into the artist folder. It had not. I tried playing the file and some of the files played while others would not. I selected a song and clicked get info and checked where the file was located on a number of the songs. Some were set to root of laptops hard drive and others listed no location. None of the songs have a red "!" next to them.

I tried creating a new music library and transferring files to it. It creates the artist name folder and album folder but no files get transferred to it. Some of those files play but most don't.

I am at my wits end and have no idea how to fix this. I can't find any setting that is not correct. I have tried dragging and dropping files, and get the same results. I try ripping a cd and get the same results. I have tried importing and get the same results. I even tried loading a previous Library File and same results occur when adding music.

Any help would be appreciated!

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 14.1

Posted on Oct 29, 2023 7:13 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 2, 2023 1:08 PM in response to jlachoff

I thought I would update this after finally figuring out the issue. After much time talking with tech support and finally connecting with a senior tech, we found a solution. So we thought. It seems that when I did the update to Sonoma it didn't like how the library file was saved. Somehow, I had a library file created on in the normal music folder on the root drive; however, my music was on an external. The support tech said the library file should reside on the same drive. After removing the library file, we started a new library and located it on the external drive. All was well and files no longer being lost.

Just when I thought we had it all sorted out and no longer on a call with support, the problem started again. This time I finally found a pattern with the problem! It seems that any music file that didn't use the standard lettering didn't get transfered properly. Here are a couple examples:

Rafael Frübeck De Burgos_ Paris National Opera Orchestra & Chorus

Mel Tormé

Händel_ Messiah (Highlights)

Gülsin Onay_ Bilkent Symphony Orchestra & Howard Griffiths

You see the underlined letters above? Well, that was the issue. Any music artist or title that has those special characters would not load. So, I transferred the files to my other computer (2012 MacBook Pro) and did a name change in Apple Music removing all the special characters. (I don't have another program to modify the metadata on the files (if anyone has a suggestion for a program please notify me via here.))

After importing them back into MacBook Pro M2, all files loaded correctly and played! Going into see where the file was stored and the information was there, unlike before.

I hope this helps someone!

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Answer 2

Mar 5, 2024 9:36 AM in response to nightvisions64

I was finally able found the issue, and it's the formatting of the external drive. I had it formatted as exFAT so it couldn't also work on Windows, but seems like Music doesn't like that, and that's why any special characters on the artist or album name make the file disappear and unable to play but without showing an exclamation icon.

I had to move everything on the disc to another computer and format it as APFS, and copy everything back. I won't be able to use the disc with Windows, but at least now all the tags are correct, and I have no issues playing any files.

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Answer 3

Jan 9, 2024 3:55 PM in response to nightvisions64

I just figured this out a few days ago. I recently moved my music from iTunes on Windows to Music on a MacBook Pro, but since my library is so big it wouldn't fit so I moved everything to an external drive. Music kept disappearing and not playing just like you described. I was hoping to find a solution for this because correct tagging is very important to me. This seems like a pretty big bug. I would hope Apple want to fix this unless they want to **** people off into subscribing to their streaming service (which I'm not going to do)

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Answer 4

jlachoff

Level 1

23 points

Oct 29, 2023 9:11 AM in response to nightvisions64

That sounds annoying, but I'm not surprised. I used Apple Music (and iTunes before it) for many years as a way of curating my library of music files, but I found that when I moved my very large library of music files to an external device (either a NAS or a hard drive), I had reliability problems similar to what you are describing.

I hope you find a specific solution to your problem, but I'll share that I finally gave up using Apple Music as a front end for playing back my local music library files. Instead, when I buy and download music, I manually add the files to my music library, and just redundantly add the streaming version of the same tracks from Apple Music's streaming service to Apple Music. It's ridiculous, but seems to fit Apple's strategy of serving 80% of their customers very well (in this case, with a robust high quality streaming service), while leaving folks who are fussy about audio to seek other solutions.

As an alternative, I've considered trying Roon (https://roon.app/en/) but it's pricey and would be yet another tool to integrate, though it seems to be designed specifically for those of us who want a robust way to listen to local digital libraries of music files. Sorry I don't have a more direct solution to offer.

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Apple Music has a number of issues after updating to Sonoma 14

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