PSA - Apple TV says "no music was found in you library"

[Chesapeake HT]

Hey all,

I was looking for answers to a weird issue I was having with my ATV tonight. Over the past couple days I was loading a prized library of Grateful Dead shows on my Mac. (Had to do this because I made the mistake of syncing the GD library with my Apple Music account which caused all sorts of havoc with song numbering, artwork, etc. What a mess it was!) Anyway, I wanted the newly reloaded GD library available on my ATV to play through my stereo.

Previously everything had worked just fine with accessing the music library on my Mac through the Computers app on the ATV. However, this time ATV could not find my music! I got this message, "no music was found in you library". Not good.

I searched for possible solutions all over the internet. Tried logging out, unsharing and resharing multiple times, unplugging things, etc. Nothing worked. I could see the GD library on my phone under Home Sharing in the Music app. I could see my Photos on the ATV, but not the music library.

I tried one more search and came across this Reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/s74wxz A response to the OP read similar to my situation. In fact had not tried the search feature in the Computers app, but with that I could see all my music! The main thing that the poster stated was there was some sort of recognition issue when a genre was not available/used. I have no assigned genre to the GD albums in my library.

The light bulb went off! So I went to my GD library on the Mac and added a genre for one of the several albums (all had been empty (ie, null values)). After I did that and restarted my ATV, the entire music library on my Mac was available!

So, hopefully this account can be found by others and help them if you run into a similar issue! Happy listening all.

 

[Trebdp83]

Curious, have you used the iTunes Remote app in an iPhone or iPad to Airplay your Mac library to network connected, Airplay capable systems or do you play it all from your Apple TV connected to one system?

 

[Chesapeake HT]

I have ATV on all of my TVs in the house. I can access my Apple Music account through each of them and separately access my music library on my Mac through the Computers app on the ATV. No need to use airplay with my ATVs, but airplay does work with the Remote app on my iPhone.

 

[Trebdp83]

Are all of the Apple TVs newer models that support Airplay 2? If so, you can use the remote app to connect to your Mac's downloaded/ripped library and Airplay your music to all of the Apple TVs at once and also control the volume of each Apple TV separately. HDMI-CEC would allow the Apple TVs to control power and volume of connected receivers and TVs. You could also connect directly to any TVs, receivers and Airplay 2 capable speakers that also might be on your network. You can do it all from your iPhone without having to touch any of the Apple TV remote controllers in any of the rooms at all. Results will vary of course.