Apple Music messes up Music folder under Sequoia

See Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community for some background. The default location for the music media folder is ~/Music/Music/Media, with Music then adding a /Music folder to separate music from other types of media in the library (of which there aren't any). This is a legacy from iTunes Media Organization where it made sense. You can tell music not to create the final /Music folder before artist folders if you edit the hidden preference file .Media Preferences.plist in your media folder, change the integer value from 1 to 0, then turn Keep organize off, and back on again.

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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 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 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.

tt2

Ouch. Yes Macs normally handle folder overwrites a little awkwardly, with the new version of the folder completely replacing what was there before. Windows would normally merge the two, with prompts when one copy of file is to replace another with the same name.

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Understood. I've given you my boilerplate that covers any sort of split album. The point remains that for best results adding an album artist has always been a good idea. There are a couple of controls that also affect things, which I should probably include in that boilerplate. If you go into the Songs view, then use View > Column Browser > Show Column Browser you can then make sure that View > Column Browser > Group Compilations and View > Column Browser > Use Album Artists are both ticked. Despite being tucked away in this submenu both options will affect the behaviour of other views of the library and generally help to ensure that all tracks of an album are kept together.

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