Cannot downgrade to iTunes from Music (and there is a complication, please read on . . .)

Cannot downgrade to iTunes from Music (and there is a complication, please read on . . .)

I have this strange problem.

I run several Macbooks, all in different places and all linke to Onedrive so I don’t have to schlepp one around.

One runs Catalina and has iTunes and I can sync films on it to my iPad. Another also has Catalina, but has Music (the iTunes ‘improvement’) which refuses point-blank to load any films (different ones, of course) onto my iPad. Why I don’t know.

I suspect it is this: at one point, just experimenting, I used Opencore (it is an older ‘vintage / obsolete’ Macbook) to install Big Sur or it might even have been Monterey on it, but didn’t much like it. So I wiped the disk completely and went back to Catalina. But for some reason Music remained.

Could it be that Opencore did some deep, deep changes to the firmware of the laptop so that parts of it think it is still running Big Sur?

I ask because I have downloaded and tried to install several older versions of iTunes, pre the change to Music and later, but each time I’m told it is incompatible with the OS X version I am using. And i think it means Big Sur even though it is theoretically now Catalina again.

Advice and knowledge from any of you guys about it all will be welcome.

NB Frankly and I have to say as all too often, an Apple improvement seems to be anything but: loading films from a Mac to an iPad under iTunes as once a simply matter of clicking ‘file sharing’ under a given app (in this case VLC) and minutes later it was available for viewing.

With Music all you can do is – in my case theoretically – sync ‘the latest one / three / five etc unwatched films. You can’t seem to specify which. Why I don’t know. Apple, of course, always insist it knows best and that it is us, the punter, who is at fault. But hey-ho . . .