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NJRonbo

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 10, 2007
3,132
1,155
I take a lot of pride in my music collection. Spent years collating my iTunes music with over 8,000 songs.

What a heartbreak to see Catalina ruin most of it.

First, you would think it would be easy copying the music folder from a Mojave laptop to Catalina, point iTunes to it, and have it all work properly.

No way!

First, the new Music app would not even let me use the original iTunes.XML/.ITL file that you normally can use. It created its own music library file

Upon launch but over 250 songs are missing from the total song count.

On top of that, I am getting quite a few "circles with exclamation points inside" indicating songs can't be found. So, I have this task ahead of me on manually matching up songs in my iTunes library to the drive location.

On top of that, I am getting tons of little clouds saying I have to download the songs from the iCloud library I subscribe to

When the music is transferred to my iPhone, I get the same little clouds saying I have to download the music.

All the music is on my hard drive. Why is it not properly getting propagated to the Music app on Catalina and on my iPhone?
 

Burningtime

macrumors member
Jan 2, 2015
37
84
BOSTON, MA.
I can't stand Catalina's handling of music. I have around 1TB of music on an external drive. Most of it, let's say about 800gigs is music that is not on any streaming sites or Apple Music. I can't seem to drag and drop these albums onto my phone. I can drag any music I've purchased on iTunes no problem.

The weird thing is, I can drag the music into a playlist, and then drag the playlist onto my phone.

Does anyone have any idea how to just get music to drag onto my iPhone like I was doing for years before this? The albums import into my Music app no problem. They play in the app no problem. But getting them onto my iPhone is a nightmare.
 
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