Locating Apple Music files on macOS disk storage

Choose Home from the Finder's Go menu and then Music; if you've moved the library, it'll be where you put it.

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It is generally not a good idea to store your media in the OneDrive folder, not least because selecting the top level folder means anything else you have in OneDrive might be misinterpreted as music by the storage function. Apple Music does not play nicely with third party cloud software. If you have a track that is in OneDrive, but not stored locally, Music may stall if asked to play it, and it likely won't be able to sync it to any connected device.

See Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community for some general advice on how to organize the Music library.

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Right/control click on any track and use the Show in Finder menu item to reveal where it is located. Or look at the Song Info (cmd+i) > File tab.

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Setting the media folder in Music's preferences tells Music where to put new files that are ripped, downloaded, converted, copied, etc. It doesn't move existing content, or cause new content in that location to be discovered. The link I posted earlier suggests how you might move content around to get your library into the standard shape that is easier to backup and migrate to another computer when needed, along with cleaning up any old iTunes legacy content you might have. Has changing the media folder location made a difference to your storage report?

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Medier would be the intended location for your media folder from what you show there. You could try moving one artist folder from the OneDrive folder into it, then check to make sure those tracks play correctly. Repeat in bigger batches if successful. Note this must be a move within the same drive, not a copy and paste. It won't work if the OneDrive folder is actually on a different physical volume.

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Generally cloud storage systems use some local storage. You typically get options to keep local copies for speed of access, or to remove them to free up disk space but get a performance hit when you try to open them. You can right- or control-click a file or folder and see what the context menu offers you.

The dated music library files are backup of the library database made when there have been updates to the Music app that change the internal layout of the database. Keep the most recent two or three just in case you need to revert to them for some reason, e.g. recover an accidentally deleted playlist, and discard the older ones.

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Apple Music and iTunes generally organize music in the pattern:

<Media Folder>/[Music/]<Artist>/<Album>/[D-]## <Name>.<Ext>

where artist is the Album Artist, or the Artist if album artist is blank, or Compilations if the flag Part of a compilation is set, or Unknown Artist as a last resort. The compilations flag was used in old versions of iTunes to link tracks together before the Album Artist field was introduced. In some cases anthologies of a single artist or band's work are also marked as a compilation when it would be better if they were not. You can select all of the tracks of an album and change this property if you wish. For an album that is a collection of tracks by different artists you would normally set the album artist to Various Artists, and set part of a compilation to true.

The [Music/] part is an optional music subfolder between the media folder and the artist folder layers which I discuss in more detail in the iTunes Media Organization section of Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community.

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kstrid wrote:

What happens if I delete the compilation folder?

Music might still be able to play those tracks until you empty the trash, after which it would complain that it cannot play the song because it cannot be found. You should probably use Music to clean up unwanted content rather than Finder. You should be able to review what is in compilations by going to Artists > Compilations in the Music sidebar.

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You could restore the data in OneDrive if you have plenty of capacity there, and use the right-click Free up space option if it starts trying to download to your computer, but I'd suggest you Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support so that you have a backup that is always up to date, and not necessarily eating whatever your OneDrive allowance is.

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See Duplicate songs in iTunes - Apple Community for general advice on duplicates. Moving files around by hand can confuse the library. On a Mac you can usually get away with it provided they stay on the same physical volume. In a situation such as shown above where each broken track is paired with a working copy, then you want to try sorting the list by date added in the hope that it will place all of the broken tracks in a single group, making it easier to select and delete that group from the library. If you only have broken tracks with the exclamation marks then you might want to try down original source files that you can restore to the location where Music expects to find them. This can be seen if you use Song Info (cmd+), decline when asked to locate the file, and then review the File tab.

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iPhone doesn't make use of iCloud Drive or OneDrive for music. Any unhidden iTunes Store purchases are made available to any library or device that is signed into your Apple Account, via a mechanism that allows them to be streamed or downloaded. If you also have a subscription to Apple Music or iTunes Match and enable the "Sync Library" function then the tracks that are matched or uploaded from your computer also become available across your libraries and devices in the same way. If you sync with a computer over a USB connection then whatever selection of tracks you pick is copied across to the device and takes up space on it all of the time.

See Sync music between your Mac and iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support.

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