Don't "upgrade" to Catalina if you have a large iTunes library

Haven’t played with it enough yet, but I doubt I’d encounter that anyway as I don’t ever use any sort of “compilation” setting. It’s one of those quirks we all have in some way when organizing our music.

For example, let’s take the first Merry Axemas album that has Christmas songs by a variety of guitarists. This is how it’s currently setup in iTunes:

The album is listed as Merry Axemas 1. Each song is listed as each song title. And then the artist is the guitarist on that particular song. The genre is Christmas which I can easily see... wait for it... in the Column Browser!!! (Sorry)

Clicking on the album in the Albums column, I can see all 11 songs. And then, each song is listed in the artist's section under their own name like Alex Lifeson or Jeff Beck.

If you select the album and choose Get Info, you’d see that I do not have checked, “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists” even though that’s what the album is.

I don’t know why, but somewhere along the line something happened and I decided I don’t like checking that option. Maybe if I was more into classic music it would be more important to me.

So anytime iTunes thought something was a compilation, I “fixed” it and, thus, never deal with that sort of thing in my library.

(Hopefully that made sense.)

 

Yea I did the same and in iTunes they are fine. In Swinsian, they are split up, despite having ''comps" unclicked. I've re-tagged a bunch but it's gotten too annoying. I'm finding a few what I assume to be bugs in Swinsian. Be careful and watchful of your music folders as I have noticed if I make a change in Swinsian, a track can disappear and / or be moved in my music folder. I've gone thru Preferences with a fine comb so it's nothing I've done or set wrong, but I'm not sure I trust Swinsian all the way. Bummer.

 

I've experienced the opposite. Weird.

 

Yeah, moving stuff around is not what I want from my music manager when I basically tell it, “Thanks, but I’ve got my folders set just the way I like ‘em.”

 

Well. I just spent all morning messing and testing further with Swinsian and have decided it's got too many quirks. The Watched Folder thing will work instantly on some folders and not at all on others, if I add a folder from desktop, it does not add it to my main music folder, despite having that option chosen, so had to retrieve the desktop folder from the trash or I would have lost the music files. Also the splitting up of Artists and Albums is really annoying and no matter how I re-tag them it doesn't work. So will stick with Roon/Tidal/iMazing I guess. That said, Catalina on my macbook is working fine. I loaded another 50 albums for a test last night, and they all loaded rather quickly and all art work was there, even some bootlegs. Perhaps not doing one's entire huge library at once is the key?

 

That’s an interesting point for me. I’ll get Catalina on a new system, so I won’t be installing it over an existing setup. While I can import settings and data from the old computer to the new one, I could just take a bit more time and manually drag music into the new app a little at a time. And that would apply whether I’m using the new Music app, Swinsian or something else.

I just took a look at Roon since you mentioned it. Not sure how I feel about a subscription for music management software. I’m starting to reach my limit with subscriptions to this, that and the other.

 

There is supposed to be a fix, that by signing out of the iTunes store on the phone, the files are supposed to not have region exceptions. However, I've tried that and then reloaded all the music overnight. Not one album has all songs. It's a mess. Even the new cd (Amendola vs Blades--Everybody Wins) only transfers four of the eight songs to the phone. And, while I can play all of my music on the iMac, the options for controling the music transfer seriously suck. Poor design, non-functional operation.
I tried drag and drop, but then, even though my music app showed the album on the phone, the phone didn't show the album.
Perhaps I'm going to have to wipe the phone and start again. And all of this began by installing Catalina and then trying to add a new cd of music to the iPhone.

 

I have not read thru this thread but just wanted to ask, what’s prompting everybody to upgrade to Catalina? Just curious coz my macs are still on High Sierra and just find no need to upgrade to Mojave.

 

One’s desire to inflict pain on oneself.

It can be a variety of reasons:

1. Better security being that a new OS is more current to the ills of maleware and what-not. As time goes on, the older OS updates for security aren’t always guaranteed.
2. More efficiency and speed. Probably not noticeable by a lot of people, but a new OS, in theory, is more efficient, especially if clean-installed.
3. Features that you can’t get on your current OS. I know Airdrop was a reason I upgraded one time because that feature alone made my life easier.
4. The ability to run software that was designed for iOS and now being ported over to MacOS because it’s now easier for a developer to port an iOS app without having to do a separate app for Mac.
5. Stuff like Sidecar which might be useful for some.
6. Third-party apps that you love that either use new features of a new OS, or will stop being supported on an older OS.

You get the idea. Usually nothing major anymore since a new OS comes out almost every year or two. But if there’s one little thing that might make your life easier, or make you more efficient, it’s certainly tempting.

 

I might be getting a new desktop Mac somewhat soon. If so, I will keep my 2013 MAC with itunes and my external HD with 175,000 SONGS as is. Then I'll copy the drive and see how all the music works on the new Mac with Catalina. At least I'll have my current setup working so nothing t lose.. It will be interesting to compare the two setups..

 

Getting rid of iTunes was certainly tempting.

 

Question for anyone who hasn’t upgraded yet, that I haven’t seen addressed after searching the thread.

Is anyone that syncs their library to the Apple Music Cloud suddenly finding that iTunes/Mojave won’t sync with the cloud for new files added or modified on my local drive? This has just crept up within the last few days.

Please let me know your recent experiences only, as I’m more than aware of the editorial comments about their Cloud itself. My experience before this recent event hasn’t been glitch free, but it was far less worse than I feared.

 

I only have a couple of compilation albums, but I have a vague memory that Swinsian handles them differently to iTunes.
Itunes would randomly decide that various single tracks were really part of some compilation album I'd never heard of, so I had to go through and delete the album information, so that they just sat under the artist again - but I can't remember now if I did that in iTunes or Swinsian.
In Swinsian theres an option under the View>Browser menu - but I'm not sure what it does.

 

Not a Mac user (used to be and still have an iPhone) but we were warned today by our head of IT to not upgrade machines to Catalina due to various issues including anti virus software, usb wireless adaptors and AppleID and cloud services not working.

Have Apple really taken their eye off the desktop ball this badly? For their own services not to work properly is not good.

 

Yeah, blame iTunes because someone in the world uploaded incorrect metadata with a CD submission.

 

I've been enjoying the evil sensation of suspecting that many of the people moaning and groaning about various gripes with macOS Catalina Music are the same people who went on and on for years about the awful bloated glitchiness of old-school iTunes. Beware of what ya wish for suckas!

 

There are probably millions of people who have upgraded and they are all hitting the apple servers at the same time, give it a couple of weeks and it should be back to normal.

 

I strongly suspect that those complaining about iTunes being bloated weren't power users that depended on iTunes being a reliable way to manage their library. Yes, Podcasts and TV could have been split out into separate apps, but not by strippings out functionality that's been here for 18 years and giving us this useless mess that we've got now.

 

Yeah I think I'm not really explaining this correctly. Swinsian is calling albums by artists compilations if there is anything in the metadata that suggests another artist, or even if it is a compilation album, it splits it up into separate tracks. If you click ''compilation" it actually moves all your files on your hd. It's a mess I closed it down. Was thinking of writing the guy who develops it though.

 

In retrospect I think I just should have exited iTunes. Of course it took a power failure for me to figure this out. Once I restarted my Mac and opened iTunes, I saw the added tracks on my phone.

 

*Update* I installed the Catalina supplemental update and have synced the iPhone two more times, once each of the past mornings. My library has returned in full--I think (it's too large to check, but scrolling through and jumping through the alphabet of songs hasn't revealed any greyed out titles). And none of my music is stored on my iCloud account.
The interface for Music still sucks, and the drag and drop doesn't seem to initiate an upload. I have to burn another cd and see if I can add it to the phone without syncing.

And I updated to Catalina when prompted because I thought it would be a good OS and that separating music from movies and podcasts would result in a more robust and less buggy music application. iTunes has been presenting problems with file transfers in various ways, including files that play on the desktop but when transfered to the iPhone become corrupted.
I guess I'll still be looking for an alternative application to manage my music library. But for now, the portability issue is solved--and I own all of the music in different (better) formats anyway! All I need is electricity. (All this, combined with the recent PG&E power outage and the promise that this is only the beginning here in California, makes me think I should purchase a solar powered-generator...spinning records in a blackout, how fine a life!)

 

Good luck with the outages. I moved out of CA a couple of decades ago and don’t miss it. Between water shortages, wildfires, power outages and other stuff over the years, it takes a lot of patience to live there these days.

And congrats on an ultimately successful migration of your music.

 

I am about to purchase a new iMac to replace my moribund 2007 MacBook Pro.

I have a 1 terabyte external hard drive nearly full with my music, all ripped from CD to ALAC.

Am I screwed?

 

Don't forget earthquakes. Just had one a few hours ago here. Small one but the house shook and the record skipped.

 

You are if you don't clone the drive before attempting iTunes...