Apple Music Limitations?

[HCHTech]

Reported issue from a musician client of mine running Apple Music on a Mac Mini M1 with Big Sur. If you happen to be doing this, can you answer the following questions?

1. Can you choose an external drive as the location of your music folder and Library? I found the following unhelpful and contradictory advice from Apple:

Change where your music files are stored on Mac​

By default, your music is stored here:

Home/Music/

You can change where your music files are stored.

Important: For best results, don’t change the location of the Music folder or the folders inside it.

- Great - here's how to do it, and by the way, don't do it.

2. Is there a design limit on the size of the allowable library with Apple Music? I don't have a count yet, but I'm guessing tens of thousands of songs at minimum from this guy. Maybe his problem is his library is just too big. I know iCloud has a 25K song limit, but don't know about Apple Music. I *think* he's on the top tier so it should be 100K songs, but I didn't find that limit in Apple's documentation. Also, there may well be a size limit coming into play as well.

Thanks!

 

[Markverhyden]

You change the default location by opening Music>click on Music in upper left corner>Preferences>click on the files icon>click on the change button. Been that way for ages. But I've never run Big Sur so don't know what they did.

Why would they recommend not to change it? They know how brilliant EU's can be. Anytime anything in any OS/app gets changed from the default you can have problems. And EU's in their infinite "wisdom" rarely mentioned they changed things because the forgot. Personally I only change those default locations to directly attached storage. Done that with a few customers with huge picture stores and tiny SSD drive.

Can't comment on the size/file number limits since I've never addressed that.