Restoring a playlist of songs

[Howard Brazee]

I've been trying to remove holiday music from my Apple Music for some time. I want to be able to touch my HomePod and have it play music from Apple Music without including all of the Apple Music that I have on my Catalina Music app.

I found this link: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-delete-songs-from-apple-music and selected all of the music in a smart playlist, and told it to delete the music from library. That was a mistake, all of the music disappeared from Catalina's Music app. So I restored my iTunes Music folder from Time Machine, that playlist is still empty. But Finder can still find the songs. I then restored "Music Library.musiclibrary", that didn't help either. There is no music in that smart playlist. I opened one of the songs, and it showed up in the playlist. It would be very difficult to find all of my music that I have marked holiday just by looking through my library with my finder.

1. What do I need to restore to load my holiday music back in Catalina's Music app?
2. How do I reset what music from my Catalina's music app is part of Apple Music?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hi,

Yes, that deletes the songs from the Music Library totally. You can choose Remove from Playlist in manually created Playlists, but not Smart Playlists.

Was the Time Machine backup created after you upgraded to Catalina and converted your iTunes Library to the Music app?

When you restore a Time Machine backup of the entire Music folder, it should contain all the songs, metadata, album art, and playlists. I am not sure if something may have changed in Catalina however, as I don't use it on my Macs yet. At least that is how it worked in iTunes, as you could move your entire iTunes Library to an external drive, start iTunes holding the Option key, and selecting the moved library.

C

 

[Howard Brazee]

A month ago, I dropped my Time Machine disk and had to replace it, so I had to start over with it in Catalina.

I've been futzing around, and got back my playlists, I'm confused which thing did it, but think they were restored from my Apple Music drive somewhere.