They appear in your videos as mostly equivalent?
I have ~75, 000 songs in my iTunes music library. All but a few hundred are manually imported from my personal music collection (CDs, LPs, 45s, 78s, my own recordings). Only a few hundred are iTunes music purchases. I have never used iTunes Match and have never joined nor subscribed to Apple Music streaming – nor do I want or need to.
Before I update to Catalina, I want to feel 100% confident my years of careful iTunes tagging & Artwork remain intact once imported to the Catalina Music App. Newly imported file tags hopefully do not overwrite my tags using the “equivalent” Apple Music catalog item? (I’ve read reports of lost or overwritten Artwork in this import process, for example.) Maybe some tags are no longer supported and I’ll lose tags?
Can I still Import personal music such as from a CD or from my personal audio file recordings? Or are only iTunes purchases or Apple Music streams supported? THANKS!
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SteveMcFly
If you are not using Apple Music, then simply upgrading to Catalina won't force you to start using it. So none of your tags or anything like that should be missing. I have some music I also took from LPs, and many from CDs and they all seem to be fine. Of course I AM using Apple Music and iTunes Match and was before the upgrade, so it is not the same as what you are doing. Still, the Music app doesn't force you into using Apple Music. My test accounts don't use Apple Music and the music libraries in those test accounts look the same as before Catalina.
And you have a backup, so if something goes wrong you know you can go back to that, even if it will take some work to do so.
You can definitely still import music from CDs and drag-and-drop your own files in the new Music app. Those options are all still there and still the same.
Thanks, Gary! And keep up the great work!