How to prepare MacOS Catalina by organizing your iTunes library

You have years of music, film, and television cluttering up your library and you do not really know where it is. Take the time now to let your Mac sort your iTunes library before switching to macOS Catalina.

We still have a few months left before the new Catalina macOS is available to everyone, but your iTunes library is particularly messy on your Mac. You will need some time to fix the problem. And before you separate iTunes into Music, Podcasts, and Television apps, it's time to make sure you have a backup copy as well.

It's not like we're expecting Catalina's new music app to be wrong. However, iTunes libraries have posed particular problems and if this happens again, we would prefer to know if it was a Catalina problem or not. In addition, we would prefer to know that we have a safe and a full backup of our media on which we can return.

This backup is vital. You have years of media gathering that it might be difficult or at least extremely tedious to replace – you must not only find the CDs you have extracted, but you must also find a way to extract them again without the need for it. 39; no current Mac a CD or DVD player.

However, you must also make sure your library is complete and intact before you save it. There is not much interest and a lot of anxiety to restore a backup before discovering that much of it is missing.

Therefore, before you back up your iTunes library, make sure that it is complete, and then do what Apple first calls its consolidation.

Warranty of completion

Go to iTunes preferences, click on Advanced and see that the option Automatically delete watched movies and TV shows is not selected.

Although we can treat iCloud or the iTunes Store as a backup repository of what we are looking at, this is not the case. Apple even highlights it in its support documentation. "iTunes in the cloud is not a backup service," he added. "Having a local copy (a copy downloaded to a computer) is the only way to back up the media you have purchased."
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201625

Then choose the Account menu. Depending on whether or not you have the family share configuration, you will see an option called Purchased or Purchased family. Select the one that appears. Click on the button Not in my library and then, right, choose Music, Movies, TV Shows and Audiobooks.

Your Mac will now show you a list of all the media of this type you have. There will be an iCloud download icon next to each one and if you click on it, you're done.

For this movie or show or something else.

There is no bulk download and we can not find any way to automate the process. Just click on the download icon repeatedly.

Consolidation

Once you have downloaded all your previous purchases, the consolidation means that they are all in the same place. This means that whatever you or iTunes have ever done with one of your media, you fix it now.

It is possible, for example, to have support listed in your iTunes library but residing physically elsewhere. You should know if you have already figured out how to do that or if you have such media, but we 're talking about using iTunes for fifteen years, no one remembers that.

However, if you do not check it, you may be able to restore an iTunes backup and discover that these other files have not been copied.

So in iTunes on your Mac, go to the Files menu, choose Library so what Organize the library.

Click on the marked box Consolidate files so what D & # 39; agreement.

If a media is listed in iTunes but elsewhere, it will be transferred to iTunes. What it really does is copy such a file. He places the copy in the iTunes Media folder and updates the iTunes library to indicate where it is now.

It is specifically copied, not moved. So at the end of this process you will have two copies of such a medium. You can delete the original that is outside the iTunes library, but make sure you have a backup copy of the first one.

Fortunately, backing up your iTunes library should be simple. Apple keeps everything, all your media and all the information about it in a single iTunes folder so that as long as that backup is backed up, it can be safely restored.

Already organized

If you do not have room for these duplicates on your internal drive, the default location used by iTunes, you can fix it. You can move the entire library elsewhere.

You do not just run out of storage space with this duplication and consolidation. Most of us have enough iTunes libraries to occupy a large part of our internal drive.

The average iTunes library is so big that we've already shown you how to transfer all content to an external drive. You have to tell the iTunes application where you have everything set, but once you've done that, everything is fine.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/05/how-to-free-up-your-macs-internal-storage-by-moving-yoving-itour-itunes-library-to-an-external- drive

It is conceivable that there is a tiny difference in speed between recovering data from iTunes on your Mac's internal SSD and an external hard drive, but as long as the music or video is playing, you will not notice it. .

And you have the big advantage that your most valuable storage space, the Mac's boot drive, is not occupied by hundreds of gigabytes of movies and TV channels.

If you have already taken the time to do so, you can consolidate as if your library were on the internal drive of your Mac. And then you can back it up by dragging the whole iTunes folder to another external drive.

You may have already moved your iTunes library so long ago that you do not know exactly where it is on your network. In this case, open iTunes on your Mac and choose preferences. Then click Advanced and search the section Location of the iTunes media folder. Below this will be the location of your iTunes library.

Find this folder and save it elsewhere.

This is not fast

Catalina will not delete your music by design, and will not only turn to streaming. And this is not the most exciting preparation you can do for macOS Catalina, but it's one of the most important. This is also an example of how important our media is.

We bought movies once and we expected to be able to download them whenever we needed them, but this was not possible because some obscure film rights agreements were changed.

The only way to stop this is the same as you can be sure that your entire collection is safe. Group everything in an iTunes library and save it.