Organization of music, and sync from MacBook Air to iPhone

Question

Level 1

7 points

Organization of music, and sync from MacBook Air to iPhone

I'm looking for a good way to organize my music collection (on an external SSD drive), and then I'd like to sync it to my iPhone. Over the years I purchased a bunch of albums/songs on iTunes and those are still stored in my Music folder on the Mac. I also have a bunch of .m4a albums (organized in folders) coming from a USB drive, which I used in my car. Basically I'd like to consolidate all, and to sync everything to the iPhone. So am I correct in assuming these steps:

1) Move the Music folder to the external drive and point the Mac's Music app to the external drive

2) Create a Playlist folder and import the .m4a songs/albums from the USB drive in this Playlist folder (creating separate Playlists for each album in this Playlist folder?)

3) Use the Sync option in the Music app in the Mac, to sync everything to the iPhone

Is that a good way to handle it?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 15.4

Posted on Apr 7, 2025 07:59 AM

Reply

Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,729 points

Apr 11, 2025 01:22 PM in response to gstoelen

See Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community for some background on organizing your media. As far as 1) goes if the library is in a standard layout, i.e. ~/Music/Music has your .musiclibrary package and ~/Music/Music/Media has all content attached to the library then you can move the ~/Music/Music folder to an external drive, and option-start-Music to choose the library on the new path. Failing that you should use the Consolidate feature to copy your existing files into <External>/Music/Media, then copy your .musiclibrary package to <External>/Music and option-start-Music to choose the library.

Regarding 2) you can create a regular playlist and drag media into it to add that to the library and the playlist. Typically you don't need to create multiple playlists for each album as Music can display and organize a playlist as albums if you wish. The Songs view with the column browser active (via View menu) can be helpful here. If you really want to go down that road try https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=albumplaylists, it may do what you want.

For 3) see Sync music between your Mac and iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support.

tt2

Reply

Organization of music, and sync from MacBook Air to iPhone

Similar questions