It sounds to me as though Cal might also be able to use the Playlistbot droplet to consolidate his music collection if he can't get iTunes to locate his gathered music in any other way. I use it if I buy a collection (even huge ones) with Google Play or Amazon Music, or if I digitize album sides without making the results compliant with automatic info-assigning features. You just drop an appropriately named folder of song files, or a folder of appropriately named folders of song files, and it adds a playlist for each folder containing song files. I've been using the thing since iTunes in the Classic Mac OS, and it still works even for High Sierra's iTunes if you modify the script to make the iTunes version check pass automatically. From the script's commented lines:

playlistbot written by hagenstrom

playlistbot lets you create playlists and adds audiofiles to itunes corresponding to folders containing music in the finder.

Not sure how hard it would be to find online nowadays. I hesitate to redistribute it, as it was provided by the author free of charge. It was free when I downloaded it. Anybody know where it might be?

Laine Lee