kirkmc

Yes.

Playlists are all stored in the library file.

My purchased list goes all the way back to the very first albums I bought in 2001. On the left, is Recent Purchases selected? You should be able to find the album by artist in the list below, or by using the search field. This said, if the original album has been replaced by a later version, then you won't be able to complete it. This doesn't happen a lot, but there are several albums that I bought that are either no longer sold on the iTunes Store, or have been replaced by newer versions. These could be remasters, or expanded albums, where the label removes the original to not have duplicates.

I'm glad it worked. I'll add this to my notes for the next edition of my book.

Either would work fine. But it might work with just two iPhone/iPads syncing. I don't know why that needs to be turned on; maybe that's the only way that apps can add to an Apple Music library. This said, going forward, you may hit a point where the older Music app isn't fully compatible.

That's correct. I will add this to the next edition of the book. Most people won't want to bother, but I do present lots of warnings about syncing music to the cloud, especially about metadata. But, also, most people don't have two Macs so they can't do this.

I use it regularly, but I don’t sync my main library. That library is on my iMac, with about 60,000 tracks. I have another library on my laptop that I sync to the cloud, so I can access it from my iPhone and iPad. I don’t want Apple messing up the meta-data on my main library; I have seen what can happen when I do that.

I don’t use Shazam, so I don’t know how it works. This is what Apple says: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210237

The Thunderbolt connectors are USB-C jacks, that work with both USB and TB. So you may use them for USB, but you certainly won't need the additional bandwidth offered by Thunderbolt; if you do, you'd need special cables.

You’ll find scripts for Music in the site. Scripts that call iTunes will obviously not work.

Have you tried a clean install? I doubt APFS would make it that slow.

You can't remove Apple Music in Monterey, alas. Kirk

Does this happen with other devices, such as an iPhone or iPad? (If so, this excludes the storage as a factor.) In the Energy Saver preferences, do you have the MBA set to go to sleep after 7 midnutes perchance?

This is not uncommon. There can be rights issues, and albums can be removed from sale or streaming. I find several mentions of it if I search for the title in quotes on Google.

As I said, if you don't see checkboxes, then right-click and choose Uncheck Selection. When you "uncheck" tracks, they show as dimmed, even if there are no checkboxes. I don't see why those checkboxes would get "inadvertently changed too easily." If you want to make sure, create a playlist for all your music videos, and you can check it from time to time to make sure that not of the checkboxes have been checked. And then you can select all, right click, then choose Uncheck Selection. I'm not sure what this has to do with "Apple seem to be moving in directions that hold no interest to me." This specific feature has been in iTunes / Music for as long as I can remember, and probably since the very first version.