Music app loses music after macOS Monterey upgrade

I upgraded from High Sierra to Monterey (the furthest my Mac will go). Now 'Music' cannot see music from my previous iTunes except for those tracks which were downloaded from the iTunes store. (This is easy for me to work out as I have very few downloaded tracks - which seem to include the notorious U2 album...). All of my tracks are still there in the iTunes folder where they originally were. I can Option-click on a track itself and I can open it in 'Music', but I cannot access it from 'Music'. That track does not then remain visible in 'Music'. This all implies that 'Music' is seeing the library, but being very picky about what it chooses to display.

I have read all I can find on this forum about this, and there seems to be an issue with Monterey 12.6, but none of the remedies offered here have helped. Option-start 'Music' to choose the library gets me the endless spinning wheel which many others have experienced.

Has anyone figured this out?

Posted on Nov 10, 2026 5:42 AM

1 reply

Servant of Cats

Level 9 (55,707 points)

Nov 10, 2026 5:58 AM in response to John Howarth

When I went from High Sierra to Ventura – as the result of getting a new Mac – I didn't have any luck getting the Music app to recognize my iTunes library as a library.

What I did was to reimport the individual songs (from a copy of the old iTunes Library) and let Music build a new library based on the embedded metadata in the individual song files.

The big problem that I ran into is that when I attempted to build the library by importing just one or to top-level folders, Music built a library that was full of holes. The symptoms suggested some sort of overflow error where Music was building a list of every subfolder that needed to be scanned, hit a limit, silently truncated the list, and then imported all of the songs in all of the subfolders in the truncated list. I had to go back and do a number of imports of individual folders, with fewer songs, "lower down" in the iTunes library.

Depending on the size of your library, you might not run into that issue, but I thought I'd give you a heads-up, in case you do.