Apple Music - duplicate someone else's library

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Apple Music - duplicate someone else's library

My brother has an amazing Apple Music library of a few thousand songs (and nicely established playlists) that he has created over the years. I'd like to recreate his library on my computer but I don't want to spend months downloading one song at a time and manually creating playlists. It would take me months.

So, he exported his library as an XML file and I imported it into my Apple Music app. All the songs and playlists are there but the songs are grayed out and obviously won't play.

If I subscribe to iTunes Match, will the songs become available? If not, does Apple Music have a feature to accomplish this task?

We do not want to family share. He's already sharing with his family and I don't want to sync music with him but use his as a starting point for my library.

Thanks for the help...

Posted on Mar 1, 2022 10:10 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

javaliga

Level 10

119,869 points

Mar 1, 2022 6:47 PM in response to GastricReflux

When you export playlists or transfer song information, the actual songs or music videos aren’t included—just the information about them or the playlist. For more info, see:

Save a copy of a playlist in Music on Mac - Apple Support

Subscribing to iTunes Match will not help you with this problem.

To transfer the entire music library, you can try this:

Back up and restore your iTunes library on your PC - Apple Support

which is to essentially copy the library to an external disk for thumb drive and then coy it to your library.

However you will still not be able to play any music that was bought from the iTunes Store or obtained with an Apple Music subscription. That music is tied to your brother's Apple ID and will be unavailable with your Apple ID.

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Apple Music - duplicate someone else's library

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