Why does Apple Music keep seperating particular albums from my library?

I should tell you that I am not "subscribed" to Apple Music, I just have the Apple Music program on my Mac.

I stopped my subscription with Apple Music because the last time I used it, my music library was completely decimated.

When you join Apple Music, it goes through your music library looking for duplicates etc and it can in fact do a fair amount of damage. I'm sure others in the Apple community can tell exactly you why Apple Music goes through your library, I just know that it caused my library alot of damage.

Again, I am not ranting, this is all experience, things that have happened in my experience, but I would still much more prefer to use the Apple OS for computing and for my music library.

Thanks again.

Hi, and thank you for your reply!

I have actually been suffixing any artists that are being separated my Apple Music with a ., this tends to work for a time. I dont suppose it makes much difference if it is an X or a .

In my media file for each artist I start with the artist as the folder name, and then in that folder I list them by year of release - dot, space and I prefix each album with a * for a lossless album, or a ' for an MP3 album. - the album name. I find this successfully enters every album to Apple Music (or iTunes) quite successfully. I know that Apple Music will know of the release year anyway but this keeps my media file in good order.

If, however I have to edit an artist IN music or iTunes, then it removes the year for every album the artist released in my media file and I then use the other collection to add the dates back in, a bit of a task for large collections but doesnt take too long.

I do find however that Apple Music does further separate albums even if suffixed by the . (dot), thus I have allowed it to create another artist pane for the same artist. I know my back-up and my media files are spot on; if Apple Music wants to further differentiate then I let it; as long as I know what is right for each artist.

Thus even with your explanation, it does indeed seem that Apple Music has a mind of its own. I have been editing this way for about 10 years and Apple Music always wants its 'last laugh', I know what is right, thats what matters.

I did recently discover that certain albums will not play on my iPhone, this was a collection of Queen albums that a friend of mine gave me that were later releases with bonus tracks, and each album having two discs. I still have my original CDs for this artist so I added them to my library and back up and found that they do work on my iPhone. Thus I created two artists called Queen; one called Queen (orig) and the other called Queen (dot). This allows me to synch the correct albums for this band that WILL play on my iPhone; the Queen. albums will play on any device but not the iPhone, only slightly inconvenient but I know what works and what doesnt.

You may have noted that I always mention Apple Music? this is because none of this separation happens in my iTunes library - creating another copy of my music library on my other Mac was an experiment to find the differences between the two programs. I used to keep the music and everything all on one Mac but when OS Catalina was released, iTunes ceased and it became Apple Music. A completely different program for music but I found it wouldn't play ball. I could not synch any music anywhere with it, even using finder. Someone gave me an older Mac mini and I got it working and downloaded/installed an OS on it that featured iTunes - the Mac mini is for my music. I can sync to both my older gen' iPods and my iPhone using the Mac mini and iTunes.

I appreciate your reply to my original question. It does however seem that Apple Music does in fact have a mind of its own! Just as long as I know the difference, my music library is not a public library so I can keep control of it and understand all the prefixes and suffixes I have added over the years. I still say though that Apple OS is the platform for collecting music. I had a very bad experience using a Windows platform; basically it diluted every single album down to one song per album and then just left the listing of one song per album; it then removed the actual music leaving just an empty listing! Microsoft has its own rules, as does Apple but I prefer Apple every time.

Thanks for your reply, I hope my response makes sense to you, Thanks again, Mark.

I mentioned in my last reply that building my music library on my iMac with Apple Music is an experiment, its true. No matter what I have tried, it has fragmented my Marillion collection into 1446 albums each with one song! So far the Enid has 47 albums in one file and two more somewhere else.

It also disected my Blue Oyster Cult library so I removed all of the Marillion library, and the Blue Oyster Cult library. I'll keep looking in each day to see what it has done further to this, although it has started removing albums from Paul McCartney and Wings now too.

On the flip side; none of this has happened on my iMac Mini music collection in iTunes! Its all still quite perfect. Had it not been for that I might have emptied Apple Music completely and just played the music from its files in my back-up. iTunes has held firm, no issues at all, I even had a large update for my iPhone which iTunes took care of for me. I'm finding that updates for my iPhone are quite large files and the phone doesnt have the space to handle them, iTunes will download available updates and install them on my iPhone.

I understand that Apple found it quite impossible to cope with the iTunes music server, which is why they opened Apple Music starting in OS Catalina but a few valuable functions were also lost in the switch. Yes you do it via Finder with Apple Music but I find that iTunes still hits the top spot. The reason I bought a Mac in the first place was on the recommendation of a good friend, he had been telling me just how much more stable the Apple environment is for music, plus many other great advantages, there were a few gremlins in iTunes even then but I wasnt long in learning how to edit them out and It has it behaving itself even now on my Mac mini on an earlier OS. Causes NO problems at all. I'd had a few disasters trying to build my music library with Microsoft Windows, and was quite happy converting to Mac.

Apple Music? Hmmm.

My Mac mini (with iTunes) runs High Sierra and is no longer supported by updates due to its age but I kinda grew up in Apple from ElCapitan to Mohave, and really enjoyed using these OS's.

My iMac runs Monterey and is no longer supported by updates. I dont like Apple Music on this Mac.

I do still prefer a Mac, I dont like Microsoft Windows. Mac OS is a far more stable environment no matter the gremlins in Apple Music.