about a year or so ago i bought a new macbook pro. love it. it’s so new that it uses “apple music” rather than “itunes”. that’s fine and good - but i never “imported” my digital tracks into it as i keep all my digital music on an external drive. so now i have a few questions as far as best practices, etc.
my “music” folder is something like /itunes backup/portable itunes folder/music - and then of course it’s got thousands of individual folders for all of the artists, with thousands more subfolders for albums and thousands of tracks in those album folders. . is there a simple script or program that will open all those tracks in apple music? i don’t actually need to open all of them, but i need to build the metadata library.
or - maybe that’s the wrong approach. maybe apple music isn’t the way to go. in short bursts, i’ve been using VLC, but i’d like to use something with a more elegant UI. maybe you’ve got something better, something that can scan an external drive for playable media files that can build a library?
I kept 15 years worth of digital music (including over a thousand ripped CDs) on an external drive (like you, organised via iTunes) that I made the mistake of not backing up. Lost it all
Now I have a folder on my MacBook that is backed up on iCloud that I have linked to rekordbox for things that I’ll play. But still looking for the elegant solution…
heh, i’m either doing the smartest or the dumbest thing ever - your comment reminded me of rekordbox (which i’ve never used before, THAT’S how old/dumb/committed to vinyl i am).
it’s currently “importing” like 60k tracks off of my external drive. i already hate the interface. we’ll see what it do.
I think you’ll find the solution that works for your collection and habits haha. TBH I have a yin for organising things and when CDs were dying out I wanted to have everything on hand in case I had to move, save for some records that never made it to digital etc. Of course this desire was supplanted by the rise of streaming and now I’ve kind of thrown in the towel.
When I get to DJ I prefer vinyl as the limiting factor forces me to be a bit more creative but there are some edits and things I love to pull out so I organise the AIFFs in rekordbox to go on a flash drive which then plugs right into the Pioneer CDJ.
Check out Roon. It works the same way as iTunes, scans your location and makes a library from it. It’s a monthly sub (with a one off lifetime payment too) but it’s super nice looking and has so many good features. Runs lovely on Mac.
One thing I learned the hard way is that storing anything you care about on an external drive is tantamount to just waking up one day and throwing in the bin. They always break/fail. Lost all the photos of our first family overseas holiday plus tons of my kids as babies etc. wife NOT happy. That and TB’s of music saved over years - gone.
SSD drives have come down in price by a lot now. Get yourself one if you haven’t already!
I learned this the hard way too. I have try and have 3 HD backups of everything and then 2 extra cloud backups of anything important. Carbon Copy Cloner on Mac is a god send for this.
I just switched to a new macbook air and I have it as a mission to organize my music before I upload it to the new mac. I desperately need some sort of duplicate finder or something similar as I have soooo many duplicate files. Rekordbox is a nightmare, I haven’t even opened it up on the new computer yet…
Apple Music still has lots of the same features that iTunes had, including SHOW DUPLICATES.
FILE | LIBRARY | SHOW DUPLICATE ITEMS
And you can tell Apple Music to store the files on an external drive just like you did with iTunes.
SETTINGS | FILES | CHANGE
I still use Apple Music to organise my music files and edit metadata. I don’t really get what people complain about. Just turn off the Library Sync so you don’t end up getting any tracks “matched” by Apple!
my main issue with apple music at the moment is that it doesn’t scan drives or embedded folders for tracks (unless it does, in which case i’m dim/ignorant/both). i’d happily use it, if someone could explain that part to me.
Instead you drag files and/or folders into it.
You can choose whether it leaves the files where they are and plays them from there or whether it copies them into your pre-assigned media library location.
The big problem with Apple Music is that it thinks it knows better than you do how you want your music organized. Do not, whatever else you do, sign up for Apple Music as a streaming service. It will completely fuck your already organized library. Way beyond belief. And if any Apple lawyers are reading this, go fuck yourselves and get a moral backbone. Apple Music is a serious threat to any self-respecting digital DJ. The attempted integration of your personal library with the other 70,000,000+ songs you supposedly get access to is a disaster beyond compare. It’s cheap AI from before most people had even heard of the term and it’s utterly bogus. As a simple library system, entirely on your own hard drive with no streaming or significant internet component, I find Apple Music moderately adequate. It’s easy to imagine improvements, but the reality is that tech giants don’t really give a flying fuck about some subgroup of non-profit-generating degenerates like DJs. Yeah, I’ve been a DJ for over 40 years and I fly my freak flag high.
FreeFileSync is a folder comparison and synchronization software that creates and manages backup copies of all your important files. Instead of copying every file every time, FreeFileSync determines the differences between a source and a target folder and transfers only the minimum amount of data needed. FreeFileSync is Open Source software, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux
I was messing around with Macrium Reflect on my old PC and this is much simpler. Highly recommended and it’s free! (Also another +1 for Carbon Copy Cloner which I’ve used in the past on mac).
