How do I access my old iTunes music library?

suzifromhenrico wrote:

Apple Music doesn’t allow me to listen to purchased downloaded cds?

The Apple Music apps on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac allow you to listen to music from purchased CDs.

The easiest cases to explain are where you

• Are not a subscriber to iTunes Match, or to the Apple Music streaming service
• Are a subscriber to the Apple Music streaming service, but have intentionally kept the "Sync Library" feature turned off on all of your devices

In this case, you'd import music from your CDs into the iTunes or Music library on a Mac or a Window PC. Then you'd manually synchronize the iPhone with the computer. (You wouldn't need to synchronize everything in this fashion; you could, e.g. manually synchronize music while using iCloud to synchronize photos and calendars.)

Sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod using your computer - Apple Support

There can be issues with converting an iTunes library (pre-Catalina) to a Music Library (Catalina and later). I was forced to have Music build a new library by song files (and then importing smaller groups of them, when it turned out that a bug in Ventura's version of Music caused it to miss a lot of files when pointed to too many at once).

This is music that I purchased on CD and downloaded to my iTunes library, but now can no longer listen to those songs because they aren’t available on Apple Music. How do I get my purchased music back?

If I remember correctly, there was another thread on these forums where someone had

• Stopped subscribing to Apple Music
• Found that "purchased" songs on their iPhone would not play
• Found that doing manual synchronizations would not fix the problem

My guess was that they had "Sync Library" turned on, and that the Apple Music subscription service had loaded "Music in iCloud" copies of purchased music from their computer, onto their iPhone. Supposedly when you stop subscribing, the original copies are left unharmed – but the "Sync Library" copies stop working.

I suggested that the person

• Do a manual synchronization where NO songs were selected (to delete all songs from their iPhone), then
• Do a manual synchronization with the desired purchased music from their computer (to reload the music)

I believe that they said that this worked, which would lend credence to the hypothesis that DRMed "Sync Library" songs (that stopped working when the subscription ended) had been left behind and were somehow fooling the manual synchronization system into thinking that the purchased music was already present.

Suzi,

When you rip a CD with iTunes or Music, it creates a file on the computer where you do the rip. The file also exists on any copies or backups you have made.