Local Library: Apple Music on a Mac Studio
OS: macOS Monterey 12.4
DAC: dcs Vivaldi system
Number of Tracks in Library
~50,000 tracks
Description of Issue
I recently replaced my aging iMac with a new Mac Studio. That upgrade necessitated a transition from the old iTunes app running on the iMac to the newer Apple Music app on the Studio. I’ve successfully connected Roon to the new Apple Music library on the Studio. All the albums and music tracks in my local library show up in Roon as expected.
What’s missing now in Roon are all the playlists that were previously in iTunes and now reside in the Apple Music app on the Mac Studio.
In the Settings > Storage > Edit Storage Location panel, both Options for importing playlists are set to “Yes”, but my Apple Music playlists no longer appear in Roon. This is a big issue, as those playlists (probably more than 100 of them) are a key music listening resource for me. Is there a fix for this?
Roon relies on the XML file that the old iTunes application could generate automatically but the new Music application doesn’t have that functionality. You can try to export the library manually (File - Library - Export Library) and place that xml-file in the root of your music directory.
Thanks, Bert. I exported the Apple Music Library.xml file and placed it in the Apple Music “Music” folder. Turns out there are 3 folders named “Music” in the path to the Apple Music directory of albums/songs, so I hope I placed it in the right location. See uploaded screen shot. I checked the Storage settings to make sure “import iTunes playlists” was set to “Yes”, and I did a rescan. But no luck. Still no Apple Music playlists displayed in Roon. Suggestions?
I would check where the ‘Music Library.musiclibrary’ file is and place the XML in the same directory.
Optional (Make sure you have a backup)
Looking at the path of your music files (Music/Music/Media/Music) that’s not standard, I would correct that first. The standard is ‘/Macintosh HD/Users/<username>/Music/Media’ configurable in Music’s preferences. Also make sure that the ‘Keep Music Media folder organised’ and ‘Copy Files to Music Media folder when adding to library’ checkboxes are ticked. If you decide to change that don’t forget to do a ‘consolidate files’ (Music’s File - Library - Organise Library menu) otherwise the files will not be moved after you change this setting.
An interesting thing happened yesterday. Although the Apple Music playlists did not appear in Roon following the rescan I had launched, when - by chance - several hours later I happened to check again, there they were! All the Apple playlists have, in fact, been imported. Apparently there’s a background process that runs subsequent to a library scan to collect and organize the playlist data. In any case, everything is now there.
As things stand now, the XML file is in /Music/Music/Media/Music.
Whereas ‘Music Library.musiclibrary’ is sitting in /Music/Music.
Since things appear to be working, is there any need to move the XML file to the higher-level Music/Music directory? (I just don’t want to screw anything up.)
Regarding the non-standard path for my music files: that was created automatically by the Apple migration assistant when I initially set up the new Mac Studio. The former iTunes file structure was exactly along the lines you describe. But since everything now seems to be working properly with Roon, I’m hesitant to make any changes here unless there’s a good reason to do so. I really don’t want to send Roon into the process of re-importing everything (again). And I’d also not like to trigger another backup of 1.8TB of music files onto my Time Machine backup disk, which is already running short of space after backing up the fresh copies of all my music files which Apple Music created when it installed itself. Please let me know if you agree that it’s OK to leave well enough alone for now.
And one more question: I assume that if I now make changes or additions to playlists in Apple Music, I would have to manually re-export the Library.xml file and replace the older version currently sitting in the Music folder. In other words, there will be no automatic updating in Roon of changes made to playlists within Apple Music. Is that correct?
Thanks, Bert. Not getting dynamic updates of Apple Music playlist changes is less than ideal, but getting the snapshot via the XML file is far better than nothing. At minimum, that gives you the opportunity to copy an Apple playlist directly into a Roon playlist, where you could then choose to maintain it in the future. Without that capability it would be an ungodly amount of work for me to recreate my Apple playlist library within Roon. So I’m good to go.
I’ve never been able to figure out how to close a Roon support ticket, but you can go ahead and close this one.
