Cannot untick the Compilations box for certain Apple Music albums

I have just raised exactly the same issue. Spent an hour with tech support on Sunday. It is completely messed up. But what is more confusing is that if you change the name of the album, while changing the compilation tick - it sticks!!!

I think it's a bug on their end, not the software because I have had it with regular, beta and dev beta - all have the problem. I will report in tomorrow after my schedule tech support call with them to try to resolve it.

My approach to this is to create smart playlists that capture anything that I think needs correcting in my library, and put those into a playlist folder. When the folder is empty everything is correct. So there is one for tracks without artwork, one for songs or artists that contain " and " when I always use " & " and so on. For this one you might need to create a second regular playlist called say "Not Compilations" and then drag in such problem albums. The smart playlist would have the rules Playlist is Not Compilations and Compilations is True. The strategy for fixing these seems to be to make some variation on the album title (e.g. add a trailing dot or space) as well as clearing the compilations flag so that iTunes syncs your custom metadata to the cloud, and then hopefully your devices. Removing downloaded tracks from devices might help refresh metadata.

tt2

FYI This is with the support team at Apple and has been escalated. It is definitely an issue at their end. Nothing you do locally (tested on multiple Macs, multiple software versions) will resolve it. Will report in when/if we get any news.

OMG if you look at my other post in this forum, I have exactly the same problem as you with mismatched albums across devices. We are in exactly the same boat.

Is this specific (Best BTO) album downloaded or in the cloud? Just trying to reproduce the issue here in iTunes to see if it is platform specific, or related more to the Apple Music subscription platform. I found the same reluctance to remove the compilation flag with the original data as cloud content. Using a custom album name helped. I've now restored the original name and am waiting to see what happens. Downloaded items might take corrections more readily. I'll test that later.

tt2

This has been going on for years, I think. I have such a messy library, mismatched between devices. If only I could say “make xxx device the master and copy everything from that”. I have no idea how Apple are going to fix it tomorrow. I already asked if they were able to do a vanilla refresh of my library back to 0 songs that I can start rebuilding and they said they are unable to do a complete zero start on it. I don’t want to just delete everything. It doesn’t prove where the issue is and that it won’t come back.

I have discovered that it seems to work fine when running Apple Music in Safe Mode. My libraries are still all out of sync, but reassigning compilations does work in safe mode. So the question is what is NOT activated when Safe Mode is running?

See also Repair security permissions for iTunes/Music for Mac - Apple Community. The original metadata can be sticky sometimes, so perhaps adding the custom detail helps with that.

tt2