How can I move the source files of my Apple Music Library on PC without losing any data?

I currently have a setup with Apple Music I am quite happy with. I have music as FLAC files on my windows PC, added to Apple Music on the PC, with iTunes Match enabled so that I can play all of this music on my phone. This is good because music on my PC will use the data from the original FLAC files and be lossless while Apple's cloud system automatically handles converting to lossy data to stream to my phone to lower the amount of data used (My original music library is multiple TB and would not fit on my phone at all).


This all currently works flawlessly. However, I would like to move the physical location of my flac files on my hard drive to a different location, which from my testing would cause a problem. Even though the music isn't removed from my music library, Apple Music would no longer be able to find and play the flac file because the path it has saved would no longer be there. A simple way to update the path would be to delete everything from my Apple Music library and re-add it; however, if I did that, I would lose all my Apple Music specific metadata, most importantly my ratings, of which there are thousands.


So here is my question. How can I update where Apple Music expects to find my FLAC files without actually affecting the contents of my Apple Music library?




Windows, Windows 11 (22631)

Posted on Mar 4, 2025 08:59 PM

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3 replies

Mar 8, 2025 10:42 AM in response to henry3311

As far as I am aware neither iTunes nor Apple Music support .flac files.


The Apple Music app doesn't appear to support any method for opening a library from a different location, or moving the library to a new one. You can change the location of the media folder, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to the File > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate Files function of iTunes, so you cannot move/copy the files to a new location directly. What you can do, potentially, as a user of iTunes Match or Apple Music, is to remove existing downloads, set a new media folder, then download your files from the cloud. This is inefficient, and may in some cases deliver slightly different versions from your original files. Should you go down this road back up everything to a separate drive before you start.


tt2

Mar 9, 2025 03:12 PM in response to turingtest2

Ah I had meant ALAC files instead of FLAC, I forgot that I had to convert all of them because for some reason Apple Music doesn't support FLAC.


I'm actually not sure whether or not the strategy you mentioned would work. I personally doubt it, because Apple Match will only keep 256 kbps streams and my files are definitely way higher, so I would end up downloading files of significantly inferior quality. Perhaps it could work if I then replaced all of the files with the original files yet again but I'm not sure I would want to take the risk as there are definitely things that could go wrong doing that (ex. file extensions not matching).

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How can I move the source files of my Apple Music Library on PC without losing any data?

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