ALL CD Music Missing from Music App after upgrade to Big Sur

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ALL CD Music Missing from Music App after upgrade to Big Sur

I think I am late to this issue, but I recently discovered that an upgrade from Catalina to Big Sur may have made all of the 467 albums I purchased as CDs and loaded onto iTunes to vanish from the new "Music" application.

Further complicating this situation is that I did not notice the missing CD music until this weekend when I decided to play some old music on my new Macbook (Ventura 13.0). The albums are shown in Music but the song files cannot be Located according to error messages. So I opened up my old Macbook (Late 2013) Big Sur, and discover the some condition existed on that computer when I used Migration Assistant to transfer to my new Macbook.

So far I have spent more than three hours on the telephone with AppleCare. The man who was trying to help me seemed well-intentioned but evasive as to my question WHY this happened. He claimed that none of my files would have been deleted in the upgrade from Catalina to Big Sur. But he and I followed albums to the end of the path only to find files with no song files in them. So which is it? The upgrade did not delete my CD purchased song files, yet left unidisturbed only albums purchased from Apple? Or did the upgrade delete my CD files? They will not answer this question directly.

We spent a lot of time wandering around my computer screen trying to find the path and importing. Out 6,000 songs on 467 albums, maybe 1,000 were located. But it's random and in the end the collection is messed up -- most of it still not working.

He told me I had to find a back up of my iTunes library from an external drive I have, restore in my old Macbook and then migrate to new Macbook. This sounds wildly impractical. If the files are still on my computer, where are they?

Turing___2 from UK has done some detailed posting about this issue, which seems to be a widespread problem, but this is beyond my understand of how to conduct a restoration. I feel as if Applecare left me stranded and close lipped about why the files disappeared in the first place.

How should I proceed?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.7

Posted on Jan 8, 2023 11:49 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,723 points

Jan 13, 2023 03:27 PM in response to Lolita's Memory

Hi there,

Perhaps you've run across this post elsewhere. The three pieces of data at the end may help me to understand how to help you fix things. As to why this goes wrong sometimes I cannot answer to that.

The "missing file" issue with exclamation marks happens if the file is no longer where iTunes or Music expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, one of its parent folders, the drive it lives on has had a name change, or you've moved a non-portable library to a different path (see Make a split library portable for details). It is also possible that iTunes or Music have changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place, or that you've been too aggressive when deleting duplicates at some point.

Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Cmd-I to get Song Info, then click No when asked to try to locate the track. Look on the file tab for the location the library thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drives. Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, a folder renamed, or a drive label has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. If the difference between the two paths is an additional Music folder in one path then this is a layout issue. I can explain further if that is the case. If everything is where it is supposed to be try Repair security permissions for iTunes for Mac - Apple Community.

In some cases the library may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info, or when playing a track, but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. Although it says something like "use the same location" I think it expects to find the tracks in the same artist & album layout they were in previously, with one systematic change to the path.

If you want me to try to provide specific advice please post back the following details:

The location of the media folder under iTunes|Music > Preferences > Advanced
The location of a sample missing track shown under Song Info > File > Location that begins file://
The true path to the file whose details you gave in 2

See also FixLinks - an AppleScript to repair broken links in Music - Apple Community.

tt2

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ALL CD Music Missing from Music App after upgrade to Big Sur

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