Here is the solution from the other thread:
Here’s how I do things now. Its as easy and hassle-free as possible since I also needed to have my collection work properly with my FiiO M11 Plus DAP which uses Android 10 so I needed to take basically three different things into account.
I’ll do this step by step showing you how I do it, assuming I have an album in FLAC (or in your case, WAV) and want to convert it to ALAC (my preferred format), embed the cover art, keep the metadata, and literally press one button to have it sent to a pre-designated Music folder that is then (manually) scanned by Apple Music to have everything show up properly and be sorted correctly.
First, you’ll need two apps:
XLD (freeware, stick this in your toolbar). This app is about 10 times faster than all other music file conversion apps.
https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.htmlMp3Tag (it's not free but trust me, it's worth it!)
https://mp3tag.appOpen Mp3Tag preferences, and open the folder where your music lives. Make sure 100% of your metadata is in order and all files have album art attached.
I don’t focus too much on the compilation flag, choosing instead to manually change the ALBUM ARTIST to “Various Artists” for any album that has various artists. I mention this because if you choose to let Apple Music automatically manage your Music library, it will dump all “compilations” into a designated Various Artists folder anyway which is annoying.
For example: I prefer Music/Genre/Album Artist/Album
But if you let Apple Music organize things, it will create one large music folder in the hierarchy of:
Music/Album Artist/Album/
This means if you have, say a Jazz album and a Deep House album both with the compilation flag, both will be put into “Various Artists”. This drove me nuts so I eventually decided to buy Mp3Tag so I could manually sort my own Music folder like I did on Windows with MusicBee.
So lets say you want Apple Music to be your main player (as I do), but you want to be able to go into a neatly organized Music folder and not have your OCD triggered. Do it this way:
Once your album is tagged how you like it, and if you want to order your folder hierarchy by ALBUM ARTIST (like I do), select all the tracks and press CMD+3 and select FIELD = ALBUM ARTIST and Formatstring = select “artists”. This will pull the Artist field into the Album Artist field in the metadata for all selected tracks. This is where I will then manually adjust any compilations to “Various Artists”, but again, adjust according to your preferences.
Next, highlight all tracks and press CMD+1 in Mp3Tag and enter this string:
~/Music/Music/!!_library/Music/%GENRE%/%ALBUMARTIST%/%ALBUM%/$num(%track%,2) %title%
(As you can see that’s the zany location of my Music folder, change it to wherever you want yours)
If you use this string, this is what will happen.
Mp3Tag will first rename each file according to its metadata with a file name as follows:
01 Song Title.m4a
For albums with disc numbers, I sort and rename them separately with the string:
~/Music/Music/!!_library/Music/%GENRE%/%ALBUMARTIST%/%ALBUM%/%DISCNUMBER%-$num(%track%,2) %title%
To get…
1-01 Song Title.m4a
(You can adjust these to your preferences inside Mp3Tag)
It will also simultaneously move the files from the CONVERTED directory into the Music directory Apple Music will read from, with the folder hierarchy being…
[Music Library Folder]/Genre/Album Artist/Album/01 Song Title.m4a
Next we’ll set up XLD. Open XLD and go into the settings.
Select Apple Lossless for the output format. In the options, keep the bit rate and sample depth set to Same As Original (unless you want to specifically downsample a file or album)
Output directory = set a custom directory for where your converted music (WAV —> ALAC) will always end up at. For example, mine goes to a “Converted” folder here (/Users/[USER NAME]/Music/Music/Converted)
Next page, keep the “format of filename” set to Default.
Next page (Batch) = check “Preserve directory structures”. But this won’t be as important later on once we start using Mp3Tag.
On the Metadata page, I have “Add tags to the output files if possible” checked. Also check “Embed cover art images into files” (do NOT check “Scale large images when embedding cover art” unless you want to ruin all your hi-res album art in one fell swoop…like I did).
Check “Load following files in the same folder as a cover art” and specify the cover art file names you’ve designated (cover.jpg, folder.jpg and so on).
(NOTE: I manually embed all my album art so I have no experience on whether XLD will auto-embed the cover art correctly from a file in the folder. In theory, it should work just fine but you should test this with a single album first and make sure Mp3Tag shows the embedded album art before dragging and dropping your entire library into XLD).
Also check “set the compilation flag automatically” and “preserve unknown metadata if possible”. Again, test any albums and make sure they converted properly before dumping a hundred compilation albums into XLD.
This is all I use for XLD but adjust any other settings according to your needs.
Next, lets test a folder. Lets say you have an album set up like this:
Artist/Album/Songs + cover.jpg (for the album art).
Drag and drop that whole folder into XLD in your toolbar. It will convert the WAV files to ALAC, embed the album art (theoretically), and preserve the metadata (assuming its setup correctly in the WAV) and output the result to the “Converted” directory, with the same folder hierarchy intact.
Once you confirm everything converts properly with Mp3Tag in the next step, you can batch drop however many files you want onto XLD and it will auto-convert everything according to your settings. After I got my M1 MacBook I had XLD running for like 3 hours straight as I re-encoded my library into ALAC.
Next, go into Apple Music.
Select Preferences, direct it to your Music folder, and UNCHECK “Keep music folder organized”. (Unless you want Apple Music to take care of this for you).
Next, its just a matter of going into Apple Music > File > Add to Library and then select your Music folder. The album will then show up in Music completely tagged with album art (assuming that was all correct beforehand). On top of that, you have an OCD worthy Music folder neatly sorted according to your preferences.
Note: every time you add a new song or album to your Music folder using this XLD>Mp3Tag method, you will have to manually tell Apple Music to scan for Music to get it to show up.
Once this is set up you can then batch convert all your WAVs into ALAC via XLD, fine-tune the metadata in Mp3Tag, and then send them all to the Music folder with CMD+1 and your custom strings to sort your library as you see fit. This way both Apple Music and the folder itself is as neatly organized as possible, the rest is up to you to fine tune according to your preferences.