OK, I did that. I don’t see what it did.
I suppose it is. I don’t know why they would delete my files though. Seems like a bit of a dick move an intrusion to delete things without letting the user know.
It’s starting to sound as if I should see if the PowerBook will boot, and see if there’s a way to copy the files from there.
I don’t remember what happened when I signed up for Music Match, but I don’t think it deleted any of my local library - it just made everything available in iCloud.
Do you have backups?
I have two external drives. One of them has files from the 17-inch MacBook, and the other has the files from the 15-inch. The 13-inch is on one of them. They’re identical, and I never marked them so I don’t know how to find anything on them.
How was the data copied to the external drives?
That’s my recollection of how it worked. I had a huge music library, over 20,000 songs, and I was an early adopter of the Match service. Took the better part of a whole day to match and upload, but once it finished, all of the original files were still on my drive.
Turn on iCloud Music Library on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
WARNING: After you turn on iCloud Music Library on a device, all the music that’s currently on the device is deleted and replaced with songs from iCloud. Also, you can’t use iTunes to sync music with the device. You can add songs to the device only by downloading them from iCloud.
Time Machine.
I tried searching for iTunes before. I’ve just entered ‘music’ into the search box. I clicked the +. I see ‘Kind’. It shows a list of files, most of which appear to be A) Apple Loop (no idea what that is); and B) Those files appear to be files used by the computer. (Maybe Garage Band? Never used it.). There are a few MP3 files. This is an album I had on my desktop that I didn’t load into Apple Music because I didn’t want to wipe out my iPod, so why bother?
I don’t have any music on iCloud.
Which computer are you on? Your 15 inch or 13? If you’re on your 13, is this the first time you’ve used it for music?
Have you looked in the directories listed above? Not clear to me from this thread if you have.
Currently on the 13-inch. I just tried the 15-inch and found Music Library. It only has 100 tracks.
I don’t have Apple Music. In the other one (‘Music’) I click on it and it opens Apple Music. There are only 100 tracks. It also has the one album that was on my desktop.
If you used Time Machine, you can actually browse the backed-up directories in the Finder.
Exactly. We’ve fallen into the sunk cost trap. At this point we’ve spent more time speculating about the location (or non-location) of these files than a restore would have taken. Fire up Time Machine and retrieve away!
It’s unfortunate that something happened to your music archive, and honestly kind of surprising as I’ve been on the earliest betas of every new MacOS since they replaced iTunes five years ago and all my terrible stuff is still right there. But computers sometimes do weird shit and there you go.
I’ll try Time Machine when I have time.
Yesterday I tried to use 7-zip on my work computer (Windows). It was gone. Since I don’t have the authority to download apps, IT had to put it back on. Something about ‘Oh, it was probably an old version, so it got deleted.’
Rule of thumb for Microsoft.
If it’s useful or essential for Windows or MS Office, then in the next version we either hide it or delete it…
As opposed to Apple:
We know better. Do it our way, even if it makes no sense.
I’ve found the former to be a truism. The latter has always worked better for me – until now.
OK, this is weird. I looked at my phone, and there was a ‘1’ in a red circle above my Music icon. I never use Music on my phone, because I have an idea it takes up a lot of storage. So I opened it… and it appears that the 100 songs are there.
Haven’t had a chance to look at my backup drives yet.