High sierra iTunes to Monterey apple music

See Move your iTunes library to a new computer - Apple Community for general background on moving the library and migrating to Apple Music. I should work much the same as iTunes as far as music is concerned. There are changes for audiobooks, podcasts, and video content.

That said I've seen a number of posts lately where Monterey fails to correctly convert an iTunes Library.itl database correctly and just sits there with a spinning busy icon. There seem to be two possible workarounds, copy the .itl file to Big Sur or Catalina and convert it there (the media folder is not required) then move the database to Monterey and place it above the media folder, or if you have an iTunes Library.xml file you can import that into an empty Music library with File > Library > Import Playlist... as long as the media files are at the paths listed in the XML file. This method loses date added details.

If you don't have the XML file or access to Catalina or Big Sur I could convert the library for you. I've done several over the last week or so. You can send me the .itl, or a link to it on a cloud service such as iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. I would convert the library to the .musiclibrary format and post it back to you. You'll find my email address in my profile here.

tt2

You might have content in an old iTunes folder if you used iTunes at some point and migrated the library into Music with Catalina or later. Music doesn't automatically rearrange everything the same way that it would be if you only ever used Music.

If you've recovered too much media into one library and need to dedupe see Duplicate songs in iTunes - Apple Community. If you're trying to restore playlists, ratings, play counts, etc. then that should be a question of restoring a recent version of your Music Library.musiclibrary database from backup. If you have the right library, but it cannot locate the media for reasons, e.g. change of volume name, then I can guide you through repairing the broken links.

tt2

I upgraded last week and a lot of my ripped music, original music and downloaded music has disappeared. Apple Support was hopeless, even with a senior tech advisor. Now I’m working with an Apple “premiere partner” and after a week, I’m still not sure what I’ve got a what I’ve lost. And I got signed up for Apple Music which I’ve tried to avoid since they started because it was common wisdom I’d lose my original music which seems to be what’s happened. I’m beside myself. In spite of backups and iCloud, etc., Ventura doesn’t play nice. And Apple seems to not care an iota. They’re all clueless. And I’ve had Apples since 1983 and am a huge stockholder. A disaster. Don’t do it.

From whatever OS prior to Ventura. Same iMac but I’d just replaced my hard drive with a new one double the size and faster (2 > 4). The data was taken from my Time Machine because the old drive was overstuffed. But, it worked fine and I’d tested everything before I did the unthinkable. I’ve always avoided upgrades because of my fear of losing my original music and all the CDs and vinyl I’d converted years ago. I’d heard stories of Apple Music trying to find original music through Gracenote and if it doesn’t find it, it simply becomes unavailable. Also, I saw that a photo of me was replaced

with, I think, Bonnie Raitt. Flattered but… I’ll find out later what’s there and if metadata is there. My worst nightmare.

When you say "The data was taken from my Time Machine" do you mean that you restored a backup from Time Machine, or that you selected a folder in Time Machine as the media folder? Signing up to Apple Music can be a good way to add music stored on an iPhone or iPad into a cloud library such that it can be downloaded to your computer. It shouldn't delete anything from your computer.

tt2

I’m told we did a complete RESTORE” from TimeMachine and everything was there and fine (of what I tested) including my musuc on iTunes/Music. It was a few days later when I upgraded the iMac to Ventura that the Music App went nuts. A bajillion exclamation points.

Do you still have the drive with your Time Machine backup on it? Have you poked around inside ~/Music/Music/Media and/or ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media to see if you can see your music files. Perhaps the database has got confused, but ordinarily the media files should stay in place. If you've read all of my posts in this thread you'll know there has been an issue converting iTunes libraries into Music under Monterey 12.6. Perhaps the issue actually occurred then but you hadn't noticed.

Take a look around your hard drive and available backups. For now let's just see what you can find where before trying to rebuild a library with it.

tt2

Thx! Yes, we have 2 backup drives (one TimeMachine and another old media drive) and whereas I went from 27,400 +/- then to 26,000, now I’m up to 56,000ish. So now I have a lot of cleaning up and 🤞🏻 to do. Not very creative. And I have Backblaze so that’s another option. I know I had music/music/media but I don’t know about the iTunes. For now, I’m just concerned about my own original music that I pitch using “files” from iTunes (music 🙄). I’d love to know what others do about this. I’m quite nervous about the future!

This is very helpful! I suspect I might have around 20,000 duplicates which will hopefully include the 1,000 that I may have lost. I really appreciate you're taking the time with this. I just got my computer back so I'm catching up on a week's worth of emails, etc. so I probably won't start the iTunes/Music issue until tomorrow. I've got so many other Ventura issues--getting Mail to consistently delete files on my iPhone/iPad/iMac, etc.--that kind of stuff. I hate new OSs! But if you don't mind, I will definitely circle back with you as I get further along. I'm really panicking about the future when I add new original music, whether this will be a continual problem. I've had it down to a science for so long that I dread having to actual "think" about what I'm doing. Again, many thanks!!!

Did you get this migration sorted out yet?

tt2

Cool. 😎

tt2

What did you upgrade from and to? Was this on the same computer or from one machine to another?

tt2