Apple Music sync with offline files

[richwhite08]

Hopefully this is the right part of the forum to ask this.
Back in the olden days of inserting CDs into computers and ripping them, i imported a lot of my owned music. Then imported that into iTunes.

Today on my iPad I noticed some songs from albums were missing, or out of order, and there were artists I wanted to delete.

So, I went to my Mac and to the file location in Finder where music is. There, I deleted some files, re-numbered them etc.

But nothing happened in Apple Music. So instead I just made the changes there directly, which has worked great.

What I’m confused about is how these sync up - how often does Music reference the offline folder, if ever? I wanted to make changes in the folder so that if I ever restore a backup, the stuff deleted from AM directly won’t be re-added. But as I did a lot of it in AM that’s not going to update the offline files, so I’m not really sure what happens here.

 

[mikeban1]

When you make changes to your music files in the offline folder, those changes won't necessarily be reflected in Apple Music immediately. Apple Music works by syncing with the cloud, so any changes you make to your music library in the Apple Music app itself will be synced with the cloud and then propagated to all of your devices that are signed into the same Apple ID.
Changes you make to the actual music files on your Mac, on the other hand, won't be automatically synced with the cloud. However, you can force a sync by selecting the "File" menu in the Apple Music app on your Mac, then selecting "Library" and finally "Update iCloud Music Library." This will initiate a sync between your local music library and the cloud, which should then be reflected in the Apple Music app on your iPad.