Songs not playing from Music library on iPhone and MacBook Air after transfer

I have songs showing and which cannot be played from the Music library in both my Apple iPhone and 2024 Apple MacBook Air running Tahoe (macOS 26.6.2). This has been a problem for many months, and is likely related to the fact that I got a new MacBook and transferred items to it from the old one (which I no longer have).

I cannot press the "download" button because those items did not come from Apple Music Store. They came from a CD or other method of downloading to my old device.

Is there a way to get them from an older (online) backup of my past machine? As I said, I do not have that machine anymore, so my only apparent option is to hook up a CD Player to the new MacBook and/or use the other service(s) to re-download the items, and I am trying to avoid that.

Posted on Oct 7, 2026 5:53 AM

1 reply

sooperfresh

Level 2 (377 points)

Oct 12, 2026 4:11 AM in response to brethvoice

Before the CD player: if you had Apple Music or iTunes Match with Sync Library on back then, the ripped songs were uploaded from the old Mac, and any that show a cloud download icon will download fine even though they never came from the store. The ones without it are entries pointing at files that never made it across. A Time Machine backup of the old Mac is the only backup that would hold those (inside the Music or iTunes folder in your home Music folder); iCloud keeps no copy of a Mac's own music files. Also worth checking they aren't already on the new Mac in another folder: Katalog (musickatalog.com) runs alongside the Music app and its Find & Recover Missing Files searches every drive for them by name.