How to copy your music library from a Mac to an Android phone

Your music library on a Mac is a folder of ordinary audio files. Copy that folder into the Music folder on the phone, over a USB cable, and Android's music players will find it. MP3, AAC (.m4a) and FLAC play on every Android phone. Apple Lossless plays in some players and not in others, and songs downloaded with an Apple Music subscription will not play at all, because they are copy protected.

Playlists come across too, as M3U files that the Music app can export. They need one small edit first, because each line points at a place on your Mac. For films, documents and apps, see moving other files from a Mac to Android.

Where your music lives on the Mac

The Music app keeps its files in its Media folder. To see where that is, open Music and choose Music > Settings, then Files. The quicker way is to right-click any song and choose Show in Finder, which opens the folder that holds it.

When Keep Media folder organized is ticked in the same pane, the songs sit in a Music folder inside the Media folder, with one folder per artist and one per album inside that. That tree is what you copy, and nothing above it. The Music Library.musiclibrary package nearby is the app's own database, which no Android app can read.

Some songs may not be in the Media folder at all. If Copy files to Media folder when adding to library was off when you added them, they stayed where they were. File > Library > Organize Library, with Consolidate files ticked, puts copies in the Media folder and leaves the originals alone.

Which songs you can copy

Whether a song will play on the phone depends on where it came from, and the Music app tells you. Select a song, press Command-I, and look at Kind on the File tab.

Apple Music downloads are tied to your subscription and play only inside Apple's own apps. Apple Music has an Android app of its own, so a subscriber downloads those songs again there.

What Android plays

Android's own list of supported formats, the ones every phone can decode, includes MP3, AAC in an .m4a or .mp4 file, and FLAC, along with Ogg Vorbis and Opus. Files in those formats play in any ordinary music player on the phone.

Apple Lossless (ALAC) is not on that list. It uses the same .m4a ending as AAC, which makes it easy to miss: a phone's built-in player may skip those files, while players that bring their own decoders, such as VLC and Poweramp, play them. If you would rather use another player, convert them:

• Make AAC copies in the Music app. In Music > Settings > Files > Import Settings, set Import Using to AAC Encoder. Then select the songs and choose File > Convert > Create AAC Version. The originals stay as they are. AAC is lossy, so keep the lossless files on the Mac.
• Convert to FLAC, which is lossless like ALAC and plays on every Android phone. The Music app cannot write FLAC, but the free ffmpeg tool can, one file at a time: ffmpeg -i "01 Song.m4a" -c:a flac "01 Song.flac".

A folder layout players understand

Put everything in the Music folder at the top of the phone's storage, and keep the Mac's layout: Music/Artist/Album/01 Song.m4a. Players sort their libraries by the tags inside each file, so the folders matter most to you, to players that browse by folder, and to playlists.

A library too big for the phone's storage can go on an SD card, in a Music folder of its own: see using an Android SD card with a Mac. Most players notice new files by themselves. If one does not, look for a rescan option in its settings.

Bringing playlists across

1. In Music, select the playlist in the sidebar and choose File > Library > Export Playlist.
2. Set Format to M3U8, or to M3U. M3U8 is the same format saved as UTF-8, which keeps accented and non-Latin names intact.
3. Open the file in TextEdit. Each song is listed by its full path on your Mac, a place that does not exist on the phone. Lines that start with # are notes for the player; leave them.
4. With Edit > Find > Find and Replace, replace the start of each path, everything up to and including the Music/ folder inside the Media folder, with nothing. Each song's line should now read like Artist/Album/01 Song.m4a.
5. Save it, and copy it into the phone's Music folder, next to the artist folders.

The paths are now relative to the playlist file. Relative paths are part of the M3U format, and players that import M3U files, Poweramp among them, follow them. Keep the playlist beside the music it names: moved anywhere else, its paths point at nothing.

Copying the files

Any of these works. What differs is whether you can use Finder, and what the copy leaves behind.

The phone in Finder

SideMount mounts the phone over the USB cable as a volume in Finder, so you drag the artist folders from the Media folder into the phone's Music folder like any other copy. It never writes ._ or .DS_Store files on the phone. It needs USB debugging turned on once, which the setup guide covers. A big library takes a while by any route, because every file has a fixed cost on the way across, however small it is.

rsync, to keep the phone up to date

Once the phone is a volume, rsync can keep its copy in step with the Mac and copy only what is new. Here MEDIA and PHONE stand for the two paths; drag each folder from Finder into Terminal to type it:

rsync -rt --progress --exclude '.DS_Store' MEDIA/Music/ PHONE/Music/

Use -rt rather than the usual -a, because the phone cannot keep Mac permissions. Using rsync with Android and a Mac explains each flag, and the --delete option that makes the phone an exact mirror.

An MTP app

Choose File transfer in the phone's USB notification (File transfer / Android Auto on some phones), and an MTP app such as the free OpenMTP shows the phone in its own window. Drag the folders in there. It needs no USB debugging, and since MTP sends only each file's contents, no ._ files arrive either. The Mac apps for Android files compares the options.

A card reader

Filling an SD card in the Mac's card reader works too, but Finder leaves a ._ twin beside every song on a FAT32 or exFAT card, and some players try to play them. The ._ files on Android shows how to clean them off with dot_clean -m or find.

Questions