MANAGE MEDIA LIBRARIES
Organise multiple libraries in macOS
IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes
YOU WILL LEARN How to use different libraries for Music and TV
YOU’LL NEED macOS 10.15 or later
When you use the Music or TV apps, all of your locally stored content – things you’ve downloaded to your Mac or imported from local files – is stored in a single library. And that’s great, mostly. But sometimes you might want to have more than one library to keep things separate – so, for example, you might not want your home videos alongside your downloaded TV shows, or you might use your Mac for DJ sets and want to keep your deep cuts well away from your guilty pleasures or the kids’ favourites. Perhaps your library is absolutely massive and you want to have a smaller version you can keep on your mobile Mac. Or maybe you want to have different preferences for different libraries so that you can apply different display options or parental settings. Whatever the reason, it’s easy to have and switch between different media libraries on your Mac.
Option for more
In macOS Catalina, both the Music and TV apps support multiple libraries – and they do it in pretty much the same way. Simply hold down the å key as you launch the app and you’ll be given the option to choose or create a library; to return to normal, quit the app and repeat the process for the library you want to return to. As we’ll see in this tutorial, it’s all very straightforward, and you can also customise the way things work in order to avoid duplication or confusion.
Carrie Marshall