black and gray vinyl record player

How To Always Sync Your Purchased Music Between Devices Into Apple Music

  

If you’ve purchased music outside of Apple Music (for example, you’re a DJ and bought your music from Beatport, or maybe you’re supporting your favorite indie artist on Bandcamp) and want it to sync across all your devices, you might have noticed that Apple Music doesn’t always reliably upload your files to iCloud. Here’s the reliable method I’ve found that actually works.

The Problem

Simply dragging music files into Apple Music often results in them sitting locally on one device without ever syncing to the cloud. The app needs a specific nudge to recognize new files and begin the upload process.

The Solution

Follow these steps exactly, and your music will upload every time.

Step 1: Convert to AIFF

Before importing, convert your music files to AIFF format. While Apple Music supports various formats, AIFF consistently works best for cloud uploads. I don’t know why this is, I just know that anecdotally, this is where I’ve had the best luck.

If you have ffmpeg installed, you can convert files with this command (which will preserve any metadata and album art):

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -write_id3v2 1 output.aiff

For batch conversion of multiple files in a folder:

for file in *.mp3; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -write_id3v2 1 "${file%.mp3}.aiff"; done

Step 2: Create a Fresh Temporary Playlist

Open Apple Music and create a brand new, completely empty playlist. This step is crucial and must be repeated each time you want to import new music. Don’t reuse an old playlist.

Step 3: Drag and Wait

Drag your AIFF files from Finder directly into your new temporary playlist. Once the files appear in the playlist, wait about 10 seconds. Don’t rush to the next step.

Step 4: Close and Reopen (The Critical Step)

Here’s the trick that makes everything work: completely quit Apple Music and reopen it. For whatever reason, Apple Music won’t analyze and upload your files until the app has been restarted. This seems to be what triggers the cloud sync process.

Step 5: Monitor the Upload

After reopening Apple Music, give it about a minute to begin processing. You can check the upload status in two places:

  • Bottom left corner: Look for upload progress indicators
  • Songs view: Open the Songs panel to see individual tracks as they’re being uploaded

Once the uploads complete, your music will be available across all your devices through iCloud Music Library.

Step 6: Move to Your Real Playlists

Now that your tracks have been uploaded to the cloud, you can add them to any of your regular cloud-enabled playlists. The temporary playlist served its purpose, and you’re free to organize your newly imported music however you like. These tracks will now sync properly across all your devices.

Why This Works

Apple Music’s cloud sync mechanism apparently doesn’t continuously scan for new files. The app restart forces it to re-index your library and discover the newly added tracks, triggering the upload process. Using the temporary playlist seems to tell Apple that these are external files that you would like to sync up to the cloud.

This workaround has proven reliable when the standard drag-and-drop method fails, ensuring your purchased music from other sources integrates seamlessly with your Apple Music library.

A photo of a screenshot about to be taken on macOS

How to fix slow loading when trying to take a screenshot with CMD+SHIFT+4

 

I don’t know how common this is, but I wanted to share a tip that I recently learned about how to fix slow loading when trying to take a screenshot with the CMD+SHIFT+4 shortcut. It used to pop up the selector instantly, but recently I noticed it was taking multiple seconds to load up. Nothing earth shattering, but annoying and taking me out of my flow state. Here’s how I fixed it.

Load up the full screenshot panel using CMD+SHIFT+5 (note the 5, rather than 4) and see what your microphone is set to. If it’s set to anything other than None, set it _to_ None and then hit the Esc key a few times to exit out of there. Now try doing your CMD+SHIFT+4 again and it should pop up nearly instantly.

Before: A Revelator Dynamic microphone is selected
After: No microphone is selected

My assumption on why this works is that if you have a microphone configured, it probably needs to physically interface with the device and initializing hardware can sometimes take a few seconds. Having a microphone might be useful if you’re doing a screen recording using CMD+SHIFT+5 but the ...+4 option doesn’t do any video, so microphones are really not necessary here. It would be great if Apple bypassed this check already since it’s completely useless, but as it stands today, this should get your screenshot taking back instantly.

a remote control sitting in front of a television

How to use an SMB share on your NAS with Jellyfin on Windows

After the recent privacy controversy, I decided that it was time to find a replacement for Plex. Many recommendations pointed me to Jellyfin, a system which was forked from Emby, which itself was forked from Plex. I installed it, and started adding my libraries, but quickly found out that the content I had saved on my NAS was not able to be easily mounted (or so I thought). It turns out that Jellyfin really doesn’t want you to use SMB shares, even mounted network drives, but no matter, we’re professionals here. And so I’m going to show you how to use an SMB share on your NAS with Jellyfin on Windows.

We’re going to accomplish this by using a fun trick called a symbolic link. You can think of a symbolic link like an operating system-level path redirection, where one location is sym-linked (or mounted) to a link somewhere else. So for example, if you have a C: drive and an X: drive, but you really only ever want to use C:, you can mount that X: drive to a folder, let’s call it x-drive (but in reality, it can be anything you want) in C: so that to any application, you would browse to C:\x-drive and you would see the contents of X:. Crucially, the application has no knowledge of the symlink, it just sees it as a regular folder in C:. Crucially though, you are not limited to only mounting physical drives in other places; you can also mount network locations via symlinks.

Do you see where we’re going with this? We’re going to mount the SMB folder into a folder on a local drive and Jellyfin will see it as just another folder.

  1. Make sure the Jellyfin service is running as an actual user, and not the SYSTEM account. You can verify (and change, if necessary) by opening the Services MMC (Start -> Run -> services.msc). Preferably, set it to use the same user account you actually login to your computer with. This will make it easier for the following steps.
  2. Ensure that on your NAS, there is a user account created there (and this is crucial) with the exact same username and password as your PC. They must match character-for-character. So if your username on your PC is bobjones and your password is Q!W@e3r4T%Y^U&I* the account on your NAS should be bobjones and Q!W@e3r4T%Y^U&I* too.
  3. Open a PowerShell prompt as an adminstrator
  4. Decide on the local physical drive and folder name you’d like to mount the network folder to, and then have the network path to the folder ready. In this example, I’ll use C:\NAS for the local location, and \\NAS-01\Files, but remember that the local location can be any folder you want, as long as it does NOT currently exist; this process will create the mounted folder and will fail if you try to mount the network folder to a folder that already exists.
  5. In PowerShell, enter the following command:
    New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path C:\NAS\ -Target \\NAS-01\Files
  6. Open the Jellyfin console and confirm that you can now see C:\NAS (or whatever you decided to call your mountpoint)

The fact that this works as flawlessly as it does just tells me that there is no technical limitation to doing this but that rather the Jellyfin developers — for whatever reason — just simply don’t want to support it. I’ve worked in a number of roles where limiting the scope was necessary, but it’s confusing to me that they would do so for such a common type of network storage.

At any rate, I hope this article was helpful and that you are now able to use an SMB share on your NAS with Jellyfin on Windows.

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