Music (née iTunes) importing nightmare "Album is a compilation of songs"

Hi Richard,

See my post above. You really should be able to get Music to treat each album, or artist, as one entry in the library, although I will grant it does sometimes take a bit of persuasion.

tt2

It looks as if you may be neglecting to tie things together with Album Artist.

If iTunes or Music show multiple instances of an artist or an album then what generally works is to select all related tracks and use Song Info to add say a trailing X to each of the fields that the tracks should have in common:

• For an album; Album, Album Artist, and Artist (if artist is the same for all tracks) *
• For an artist; Album Artist (and Artist unless there are guest/featured artists listed which should not be changed)

Apply the change which merges things together, then remove the excess characters. Occasionally it may help to close and reopen the app between the two renaming operations. Part of a compilation should also be set consistently.

* If tracks are to be synced to a non-iOS device such as iPod classic there should be a common Artist and/or the album should be set as a Compilation.

Use the songs view and display the fields Album, Sort Album, Album Artist, Sort Album Artist, Artist and Sort Artist side by side so you see whether or not it is appropriate to edit Artist and if sort values could be causing any further problems. See Grouping tracks into albums for more help if required.

One further tip for really stubborn duplicates. At one point I had three lots of Various Artists in the artists view of my iTunes Match library that wouldn't respond to the usual trailing X treatment. What I found worked was to add the trailing X to start with, but then with each group that iTunes wanted to keep separate start typing a value and let it autocomplete from say Var... to Various Artists. Picking from the autocomplete lists seemed to work when pasting/editing the whole value didn't.

An approach I often take for guest/featured artists is to put this information into the track name, e.g. Song [Feat. Guest] so I can keep artist consistent across the album. I've been doing this since I first had a classic and I've generally stuck to it even though my iPhone can do a better job with multiple artists.

tt2

Hi head4heights,

I find this frustrating, too. My fix has been simply to put specific track information (like guest artist) in the Comments field, and reserve the Artist field for the actual artist whose album it is. Alternatively, use the Album Artist field for your Artist-A, and leave the Artist field as is. Whatever you decide to do, though, I'd suggest clicking on the Sorting tab to make sure that your tracks are sorted the way you want them in the Music app—I can't tell you how many times songs, artists, and albums in my library have shown up completely out of alphabetical order. Drives me nuts.

Hope this helps!

-matt

Same here! When Apple replaced iTunes with Music I was horrified. Even several years afterward Music still doesn't display my library like iTunes did. Albums and artists out of alphabetical order; some albums split into 2 or 3, even though the info is identical on all songs in an album. I used Retroactive so I could continue to use iTunes in Big Sur, and it works great, but it can't sync to my iPad. I have to use Music to do that and all the errors Music has made in my library goes over to the iPad that way. I've tried everything but Music is just a huge stinking pile and it doesn't look like Apple is doing anything to make it work right.

Well, isn't that bizarre!? Doing the "X" thing worked. Thank you tt2!

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2