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• Macos Big Sur
• Itunes Mac Big Sur 11.1
• Download Itunes For Mac Big Sur

Status: Dec 2020 - Confirmed that Big Sur uses the same Media file locations

And Big Sur has been engineered, down to its core, to take full advantage of all the power of the M1 chip to make the macOS experience even better for the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. The combination of Big Sur and M1 truly takes the Mac to a whole new level with incredible capabilities, efficiency, and more apps than. Apple yesterday released macOS Big Sur version 11.1, with headline new features including AirPods Max support, privacy labels in the Mac App Store, a dedicated Apple TV+ tab in the TV app, and the.

Apple decided to abandon iTunes with its Catalina macOS release. In Catalina the iTunes media swiss army knife has been replaced with three seperate applications and some functions that are now 'hidden' in sharing.

The impact is that upgrading to Catalina changes quite a lot of macOS media handling. This is likely to be problematic, for many Mac users, as media content is one of the most valuable things on a well used Mac.

This note provides guideance as to where the various media files are stored and what you can do to make things managable.

With iTunes all your media was contained within:

• ~/Music/iTunes (by default)

Sitting under this you had:

• 'iTunes Music' or 'iTunes Media' - folder (depending on how old your library is) where your various media files were kept
• 'iTunes Music Library.xml' - the old library index file
• 'iTunes Library.itl' - the new library index file

If you have set iTunes to manage your library then all your media files will be sitting under this directory structure, including: Music, Movies, TV & Podcasts

This was nice as you could move the library by just copying/moving the entire directory structure and all was well.

This is no longer the case with Catalina.

With macOS Catalina what was once handled by one big iTunes application is now handled by three big applications and Books ;-) .

• Music - for your music content and music videos
• TV - for your Movies and TV content
• Podcasts - for your podcasts
• Books - for your books which was moved out of iTunes some time ago

Each of these has its own media storage location, but depending on how you started, the actual media content could still be held within your prior iTunes Library (above).

Macos Big Sur

2016 nissan pulsar workshop manual. The default locations for media in this new world are:

• ~/Music/Music - for you music files
• ~/Movies/TV - for your movie and tv files
• ~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/Cache - podcasts are now held in special container and not directly manageable
• ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books - iBooks were moved into a special container sometime ago, again to some surprise and have a habit of disappearing ..

The details for the various apps and storage locations are described in turn.

NOTE: These media file locations are also valid with 'Big Sur'

Music

• ~/Music/Music

Sitting within this you will have:

• Media - folder where media content files are kept
• 'Music Library.musiclibrary' - the new music library catalog file (replacement for 'iTunes Library.itl', but this is really a directory which contains a further set of files including Preferences.plist file)

NOTE: the plist file is a binary files, but you can see contents using the plutil command.

If you had an existing iTunes library then on starting the new Music app, you will be prompted to migrate your library Music. This will load the catalog and set the media location to the existing iTunes media location.

If you want re-consolidate your music and music videos under the new Music library then:

1. Ensure you have a Media directory in ~/Music/Music (i.e. ~/Music/Music/Media)
2. Change Media location via: Music - Preferences - Files to: /Users/<YOU>/Music/Music/Media . Then select - 'Keep Music folder organised' and 'Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library'. You will get prompted to copy files as per preferences, so select 'Yes'.
3. Now in Music - select: 'File - Library - Organise Library..' and when prompted select 'Yes'. It is only now that it will copy all the content from you existing iTunes media folder to the new location.

NOTE: There is a signficant bug in new Music App when it comes to keeping your iTunes cover art. There are many reports of intital migration resulting in lost cover art, and if you have very large iTunes libray then the cover art migration process can take more than a day to complete. I have found that even it you do manage to get the inital migration to Music to process the cover art successfully, if you move your library to different a machine then the cover art will get lost again and fixing is either a programming exercise or a laborious manual process.

See 'Music Cover Art' below for more information.

Music Cover Art

Music cover art is one of the problem areas in moving from iTuness to Music. In iTunes cover art is managed via a special catalog within the iTunes media library. There are a number of different levels of cover art that iTunes and Music manage:

• Indivdiual Media File - such as .mp4 or apple .m4a / .m4p variations. These can have cover art embedded into then using 'meta tags'
• Album - this is a collection of Individual Media Files within a directory/folder. Unlike an individual media files the director/folder does have directly embedded graphics, so instead the cover art graphic that is displayed must be managed as part of the overall library catalog. In the case of iTunes this cover art catalog/cache was held within the iTunes media directory. In Music the catalog is stored in seperate & fixed location.
• Artist - these are the small icon graphics that are displayed in middle panel if you view your library by Artist. Many moons ago these used to be based on Album cover art. Now they are created automatically by iTunes or Music app and there does not appeary to be a way to manually populate this data.

In Music the cover art directory appears to be maintained seperately in:

• ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.APMArtworkAgent/Data/Documents

This container based catalog is obviously not in the same directory tree as ~/Music/Music .

The consequence of this is that if you move your Music directory to another machine, then you will be leaving behind the cover art catalog.

Apple answer to this problem is that any moving of media data from one Mac to another should be done via the Migration Assistant, which is aware of all the various files and locations.

NOTE: Big Sur appears to have address some of the cover art bugs. See my Big Sur update.

TV

• ~/Movies/TV

Sitting within this you will have:

• Media - folder where media content files are kept
• 'TV Library.tvlibrary' - the TV/movie library catalog (again like Music this is a directory which contains the various library catalog files)

The migration from iTunes to Catalina TV is equivalent to that for Music. The migration to TV library occurs when you first run TV app. This generates a new catalog and media files will be left in iTunes folder.

If you want to consolidate into new ~/Movies/TV directory then you will need to follow simillar step to Music above:

1. Ensure you have Media directory in ~/Movies/TV (ie ~/Movies/TV/Media)
2. Change Media location via: TV - Preferences - Files to: /Users/<YOU>/Movies/TV/Media . Select - 'Keep Media folder organised' and 'Copy files to Media folder when adding to library'. You will get prompted to copy files as per preferences, select 'Yes'.
3. Now in TV - select: 'File - Library - Organise Library..' and when prompted select 'Yes'. It is only now that it will copy all the content from you existing iTunes media folder.

NOTE: The Movie / TV content migration seems to work and be less problematic than music one. One reason is that there is no Cover Art. A problem I have seen is that if you have downloaded movies from the iTunes Store, then these now appear twice in your Movie library, one for the downloaded copy and a second one for the iTunes store cloud version. If you delete the downloaded version from your library and then re-download the file, this fixes the problem. If you have a large number of Movies then this will result in a lot of very large downloads.

Podcasts

Be aware that the Podcasts app, will want to automatically delete played podcasts and if you have old podcast that are no longer available then this will result in lost podcasts. So ensure you change your Preferences to stop auto deletion of played podcasts.

I have sucessfully moved Podcasts from one machine to another by copying the entire directory tree and contents:

Why bother and some good things & bad things

All this moving media content around is a nuisance, so why bother. The reason is that media files take up lot of storage space and many people move them to external storage for both more storage, but also to provide greater data security. Having a large media store on a single disk has high risk of failure, in fact it is guaranteed to fail eventually.

With iTunes this was pretty easy to do as you could simply move/copy the entire iTunes directory to an alternate location and then restart iTunes holding the 'Option' key and select the new location.

When you have the catalog and media content in different directories and music and music and movies managed seperately this is not possible. So the easiest way is to accept the Catalina change and move to two seperate consolidated directories.

Having seperate library for Music and Movies means you have some additional flexibility in the files location.

I have also found that when consolidating under the new directories that the new APFS file system must be using some type of hard linking as my 700GB existing media library, did not grow to double the size on consolidation.

Once I had consolidated my content into each of the seperate directories, Movie and Podcasts appear to be readily movable, but music is problematic due Cover art bugs. On consolidating to new location I was able to remove the old iTunes directory, to help recover disk space.

This blog posting was driven by desperation, as recently our family media Mac mini running Catalina crashed and I had to go to some substantial lengths to get back all the media content on it.

The recovery process meant peeling off the details of changes that have occured to iTunes and its storage solution. The documentation for Catalina was very limited and less detailed than what was previously available on iTunes.

To validate and test this I have used a combination of repaired Mac, a KVM virtual machine based on Time Machine backup of dead Mac and a MacBook Pro laptop, so process of recovery of Catalina based media required quite a lot time, 3 Macs and lots of storage to test various alternate recovery techniques.

References & Links:

Reading and Modifying OS X plists - very old blog on plists tools

Move or Manage the Music, Apple TV and Podcasts Libraries - Rocket Yard (MacSales) partial information on how to manage Catalina media libraries

What happened to iTunes ? - Apple's answers to the surprise they gave us ..

Diacro press brake manual. Big Sur - does this change things, fix things or it is the same. I have done some initial testing and documented finding in my 'Big Sur' update

Low Res Image (based on Arcade Fire - Funeral) - via SoundCloud - Out of Tune

Get an ultimate backup app

Just a few years ago, knowing how to backup iPhone to computer hardware was common. Now, with iCloud, most of us back our iPhones up to the cloud, and the days of iTunes and iPhone backups are behind us.

But you can still backup your iPhone up to your Mac! It’s still possible in macOS 10.15 Catalina and above. The option is a bit hidden and quite basic, but it can be done.

We’ll show you exactly how to backup iPhone on Mac computers Apple’s way, and show you how to make the process much, much better!

We’ll show you exactly how to backup iPhone on Mac computers Apple’s way, and show you how to make the process much, much better!

How to backup your iPhone, iPad to Mac in macOS Catalina and Big Sur

Backing up an iPhone is the absolute best way to make sure you avoid data loss. If you never backed your iPhone up, you run a huge risk of losing all of your important data like photos, notes, reminders, and calendar appointments. You may even lose access to apps no longer available in the App Store that you’ve already downloaded.

The old method for creating backups involved iTunes. You’d plug your iPhone into the Mac, spin up iTunes, and start the process of backing your iPhone up. When Apple ditched iTunes, it left many users asking “how to backup my iPhone to my computer?”

Itunes Mac Big Sur 11.1

Well, you still plug it in, and you still create a backup – it’s just a lot more basic, now. Here’s the default method for how to backup iPhone to computer hardware like a Mac:

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac
2. Open Finder
3. On the left-hand side, select your iPhone under “Locations” (Note: If it’s your first time connecting your iPhone to your computer, select “Trust”)
4. In the button bar, select “General”
5. Under “Backups,” select “Back up all of the data on this iPhone to this Mac”
6. Select “Back Up Now”

The good news is knowing how to backup iPhone to Mac is still as simple as plugging it in! You can also choose to encrypt the backup, if you like.

How to backup iPhone to iCloud on Mac

First, know there’s no need to use your Mac to backup your iPhone to iCloud; you can do it on your iPhone without plugging it in! Just follow these steps:

1. On your iPhone, open Settings
2. Select your Apple ID banner at the top
3. Select “iCloud”
4. Select “iCloud Backup”

From here, you can select “Back Up Now.” If you don’t want to manually back your iPhone up, make sure the “iCloud Backup” option at the top of the screen is toggled on. This will back your iPhone up automatically and periodically when it’s charging.

But if you want to know how to backup iPhone on a computer to the cloud, here’s how:

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac
2. Open Finder
3. On the left-hand side, select your iPhone under “Locations” (Note: If it’s your first time connecting your iPhone to your computer, select “Trust”)
4. In the button bar, select “General”
5. Under “Backups,” select “Back up your most important data on your iPhone to iCloud”
6. Select “Back Up Now”

This will begin an immediate backup of your iPhone to iCloud, much as you would on your iPhone without plugging it in.

How to restore your iOS device backups on a Mac

Now that we know how to backup iPhone to computer hard drives – how can we restore our iPhone from a backup?

First things first: to do this, you will have to back your iPhone up to the Mac you’re plugging it into. If you don’t have a backup on your Mac, the only other way is to use iCloud. But if you followed the first set of instructions and have a backup of your iPhone on the Mac, here’s how to restore it:

Download Itunes For Mac Big Sur

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac
2. Open Finder
3. On the left-hand side, select your iPhone under “Locations”
4. In the button bar, select “General”
5. Under “Backups,” select “Restore Backup”
6. Select the backup you want to restore from the drop-down list
7. Enter your password
8. Select “Restore”

Deleting old iPhone, iPad backups on Mac

Now that we’ve answered the burning question “how do I backup my iPhone to my Mac computer?” let’s discuss how to manage those backups!

The process will feel very familiar to our other instructions, but there are some subtle differences. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac
2. Open Finder
3. On the left-hand side, select your iPhone under “Locations”
4. In the button bar, select “General”
5. Under “Backups,” select “Manage Backups”
6. Select the backup you want to remove from the list
7. Select “OK”

This only deletes backups which are stored on the Mac. It's also really binary; Apple lets you store backups of your iPhone, but the purpose is to have a backup to restore to. What if you only want to backup data? We suggest Get Backup Pro.

One of the best features of Get Backup Pro is that it allows you to create backups of the data you want, not an entire iPhone’s worth of stuff! Maybe you only want to back up a few folders or files on your iPhone to your Mac, not an entire hard drive. The app also categorizes data, and tells you exactly when your stuff was last backed up. It’s a great option for those who want to backup photos or files more often than other categories of data, for instance.

Get Backup Pro also compresses backups by up to 60%, and allows you to store your backups on any drive. We really like the idea of having an external drive with the iPhone data you’ve backed up instead of relying on the Mac.

But if you do want to keep your iPhone data on the Mac, Get Backup Pro excels at backing up Macs, too! It can even be set to backup a Mac on a schedule, and in the background. Simply put, backups are better with Get Backup Pro!

Syncing your iOS device with ease

Yes, backups are important – but what about syncing data? iCloud can help, but it’s not always reliable. There are many instances iCloud data doesn’t show up on a device because your Mac or iPhone lost connection to iCloud and your computer didn’t tell you.

Instead, we recommend using AnyTrans to sync iPhone data to your Mac. AnyTrans unashamedly picks up where iTunes left off; iOS users who remember iTunes will love AnyTrans!

AnyTrans lets you transfer files and folders to a Mac with a few clicks. Once you plug your device in, AnyTrans shows you exactly what’s on your device, right down to any downloaded media, and lets you sync it to your Mac in a snap. Instead of hoping that the movie you downloaded syncs using iCloud (or any cloud service!) make sure it syncs with AnyTrans.

AnyTrans also categorizes your data. Photos, audio, videos, messages, apps, and other data types all have a unique category in AnyTrans, allowing you to pick and choose what you want to sync, and what may not be critical. We really like the photos feature, which categorizes the type of images you have on your phone. It’s great for those of us who take a ton of screenshots but would rather manage them before syncing to our Macs!

AnyTrans can also manage backups, and has a really handy tool that lets you plug in a new iPhone and migrate data straight from your old device. There’s also a really awesome media downloader if you’d like to download videos from YouTube or another source and load it straight to your iPhone or iPad!

Conclusion

Backups are critical to the long-term security of your data. Syncing is great, too, but is only a representation of the data you have in realtime.

It’s difficult to imagine losing some data. Important files, images, or videos may not need to live on your device forever, but you’ll want to make sure it’s safe and secure.

For syncing and backups, we can’t think of a better tandem than AnyTrans and Get Backup Pro. These apps make short work of data security and sync, and are native to the Mac.

Best of all, both apps are free as part of a 7-day trial of Setapp, the world’s best suite of productivity apps for the Mac. During the free trial period, you’ll also have unlimited access to nearly 200 other excellent Mac apps. And when the trial is over, continued access to the full Setapp catalog is only $9.99 per month, or $19.99 per month for the family plan, which grants full access to Setapp on up to four Macs. It’s an incredible deal we know you’ll love, so what are you waiting for? Give Setapp a try today!

Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.

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