Apple Music on Mac library not working properly. Can't delete songs, can't sync, slow start and stuck when shutting down!

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Level 1

4 points

Apple Music on Mac library not working properly. Can't delete songs, can't sync, slow start and stuck when shutting down!

Dear Apple Music experts, I haven't been able to open my music library properly in several weeks. I would like to also note that I have been having odd issues with Apple Music for over a year. I have a huge library of almost 3TB of music that has been ripped from my CDs in ALAC format; the media folder is in an external drive. I use iTunes match as well as Apple Music to also listen to music on my phone.

The main issues started happening when the library reached, and passed the 100k song limit. After this happened, sometimes I couldn't add any more songs/albums on my iPhone but other times it would allow me to. So far I can listen to music on mu iPhone and even access my iTunes Match files! However, Apple Music turned the synced library to off after i reached the 100K song limit. I have tried multiple times to re-sync it and it takes an entire night and eventually doesn't work. It often gives errors like 9039, 9097, and several other error codes.

The problem is that when I open Apple Music on the mac, it takes a long time scan and most of the time gives an unknown error -50 (including photo below). I have read about this and it seems that it could be related to a network issue. I don't have any antivirus software and the firewall has been disabled since I have also tried opening Apple Music by starting the Mac in safe mode. The error -50 keeps appearing and I click on do not show anymore. Afterwards, I'm able to see my songs and even play pay. However, I can't delete any songs. When I click on delete either on one song or one album, nothing happens. I wonder if this library is just too large for what Apple Music can handle. Should I delete the albums directly from finder or would this make things worse?

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this issue? I would like to be able to delete albums that I haven't listened to in a while in order to reduce the total songs below the 100k limit.

Would putting the ripped files in an external ssd solve the situation?

Another issue is that Apple Music in all these attempts to try to re-sync created hundreds of duplicate playlists and when I try deleting more than one at a time nothing happens. This is really annoying because this synced to the cloud so on my iPhone I have hundreds and hundreds of playlists! (you can see in one of the below photos how massive the playlist library is by looking at the size of the scroll bar!)

Another thing that I'm not sure it is normal, ActivityMonitor shows AMPLibraryAgent taking over 20 GB of space and Music also taking 14GB of space.

Hope some of you could provide some help!

Thank you for your time,

Jon

[Edited by Moderator]

MacBook Air 13″

Posted on Jun 21, 2025 03:09 PM

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Answer 1

brbo

Level 8

38,131 points

Jul 1, 2025 01:00 AM in response to jtarbay

Hi Jon,

Welcome to tis Apple (user-to-user) Community!

Re: "Apple Music on Mac library not working properly.:

Can't delete songs, can't sync, slow start and stuck when shutting down!"

Am no expert in this area, yet your post to the community deserves some response. We can at least get a discussion underway, giving others with more expertise opportunities to share their experience.

Info. on your hardware and software would likely be helpful to those with the expertise.

Eg: Letting us know which MacOS version you have installed (Eg: Apple menu > About this Mac lists that)

and

Which MacBook Air Model you are using (If needed: How to:Identify your MacBook Air model - Apple Support

Perhaps we can try helping solve your many issues one by one:

Trying to get a list into some order here:

Managing huge music library ("ibrary reached, and passed the 100k song limit")
Music on external drive ("almost 3TB of LAC formatmusic that has been ripped from my CDs") :
Can't delete songs, ("When I click on delete either on one song or one album, nothing happens".)

( "Would putting the ripped files in an external ssd solve the situation?" )

can't sync, ("Apple Music turned the synced library to off after i reached the 100K song limit")
multitudes of duplicaed synced playlists ("when I try deleting more than one at a time nothing happens".}
slow start ("most of the time gives an unknown error -50")
stuck when shutting down
"ActivityMonitor shows AMPLibraryAgent taking over 20 GB of space and Music also taking 14GB of space"

__________________________

Now if you haven't seen it yet: Apple Support provides a great (searchable) resource:

There is a "Table of Contents" link & Search field at the top on the welcome page that opens from the link

Apple Music User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

Eg: One of the articles: Add music to build your library in Music on Mac - Apple Support

says:

you can build your music library — your collection of songs and albums — in many ways.

There is also a Music Support website with info. / support / contact options etc. Music - Official Apple Support

All the best :-)

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Answer 2

brbo

Level 8

38,131 points

Jul 11, 2025 03:11 PM in response to jtarbay

Thank you kindly, Jon for sharing your experience with the community! You've certainly been through a lot on your journey to finally find success. Congratulations!

It would be good if you chose to send feedback to Apple, to reach those who work behind-the-scenes on the Music software. They welcome feedback, and as it is still relatively "early-days", the app seems to be to still evolving. Contribution of actual experience from users of the Music app can be quite valuable. (You could include a link to this discussion thread if you wish.)

Here's a link to the feedback web-form: Feedback - Apple Music - Apple

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Answer 3

jtarbay Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 1, 2025 02:02 PM in response to brbo

Thanks for the response brbo.

There has been some possible improvements on the library. I ended up going back to an older library from my Time Machine that still had all my data intact, given that I haven't ripped any cds recently and that library opened up ok. In this one I had thousands of duplicate playlists so used a script from dougscripts to delete most of the playlists all at once. This took several hours but it worked. Then, the library had thousands of duplicate files as well and deleted over 80K of duplicate songs; not sure how this happened. It seemed that iTunes Match created duplicate songs of the uploaded files and stored them as separate files on the library. I made sure only to delete the files that were on the cloud and not the local files on the hard drive directly from Apple Music. I am still in the process of doing this so it will take me days to finish.

I'm running the latest Mac OS on a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of internal storage.

I still haven't turned on the sync function on even though the current library says that it has around 86K songs, which is below the 100K limit. However, I want to finish culling everything because I am not sure how many more songs I have added from Apple Music on my iPhone as there doesn't seem to be a way to sort for those only on the iPhone to delete them.

My iPhone is still showing thousands of duplicate playlists and I'm hoping that once I'm able to turn the sync function back on on Apple Music on the Mac, this will update the library count on the iPhone.

Thank you again for replying to the thread!

Jon

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Answer 4

brbo

Level 8

38,131 points

Jul 1, 2025 03:48 PM in response to jtarbay

Thank you for taking the time to reply, Jon, and to give us an update, and info. on your hardware and software. Am amazed at the wonderful progress you have made, in taking control of the situation! Cheers :-)

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Answer 5

jtarbay Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 11, 2025 04:06 AM in response to jtarbay

Finally solved this issue!!!

I think the problem started happening when the song count past 100k. When that happened, sync would take forever and give all sort of different errors. I think in while I tried syncing during this period of time, Apple Music created over 80k duplicate songs, over 300k duplicate playlists and made the whole UI sluggish. I spent these past several weeks by identifying and removing all these duplicates. Additionally, I started deleting the songs that had been added from Apple Music as my main goal was to end up having less than 100k songs in the library. This was tedious because since the sync feature had not been working reliably, the songs that were added from Apple Music did not show that under Cloud Status.

The duplicate playlists were troublesome to deal with and it took two days! As mentioned earlier, Apple Music created thousands of duplicates of each of the playlists that I had reaching an obscene number like 300K playlists! I tried selecting multiple playlists in Apple Music in order to delete them all at once but this feature would not work. Even when I selected two playlists and hit delete, it would only delete one of the two selected! Then, I found a script called Merge-Delete Playlists by https://dougscripts.com/. Once installed, it took hours to read and analyze the playlists. Then I was able to select all the playlists that were duplicate and delete them at once. This process took almost 2 days to complete but eventually cleaned it up! This was quite annoying because it made using playlists on the iPhone impossible.

Once I did all these things, I lowered the count to about 89k and Apple Music took a couple of days to sync successfully!

Moral of the story, don't let your library go over 100k unless you don't use Apple Music streaming. Not sure if the 100k limit also exists for iTunes Match. It's wild that Apple hasn't increased the 100k limit. Now that everything is working well, the interface is quite quick even though the entire library lives on an external hard drive (72000 rpm), so I don't see why this limit is necessary!

cheers!

Jon

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Apple Music on Mac library not working properly. Can't delete songs, can't sync, slow start and stuck when shutting down!

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