Fixing "Missing" Apple Music Files
For years my wife has been using Bootcamp on an Intel Mac to use both Apple and Windows. Her iTunes account was on the Windows side. Recently, for a variety of reasons, she finally decided to migrate all of her media to the Apple side on her M1 MacbookPro.
Upon transferring the iTunes Library and media we were greeted by over 2,500 missing songs (out of just over 10,000). Some of the song files genuinely did not transfer and needed to be recovered from a backup drive or redownloaded from Apple Music. But the vast majority are in the Music Library folder.
I'm attaching a series of screenshots that show the steps I have to take to fix each song:
In this picture we have just one album. You can see that there is no rhyme or reason for which songs imported fine and which are broken.
As seen here, the file is exactly where it should be named exactly as it should be.
Unfortunately, this part is also not working. Despite the song, and all the others on the album, being where they should be, Apple Music seems completely unable to find them. As you can see, I've manually done this for 500 songs so far. But those have been the low hanging fruit. On top of this, I know I have accidently selected the wrong song on several occasions.
So to the actual question.
- Does anybody know what happened during the importing of her iTunes Library to cause this?
- Is there a quick fix? When I called Apple TechSupport they told me to just delete the library and start anew. While this did work in an alternate library, the loss of the metadata (Play Count, Date Added, etc.) is an unacceptable price.
- If there is no quick fix, is there any way to do this any faster than one song at a time? As in, is there a way to fix the Apple Music "Find Files?"
Finally, since I'm only Level 1, I'm hoping someone could pass along a request to the host to change my username. I made this account twenty years ago and now I would very much like to separate my name from internet accounts. Thank you for all your help.
