Split albums when browsing own/local library by album in Music (iOS and macOS) cause identified?

So this isn't exactly a question, but a potential bug that I identified in the functionality of browsing through owned (and downloaded) albums on the Music app, both in iOS and MacOS. I've seen that a number of people have previously complained about this and I did some digging to try to clean up my own music library and found a potential solution and cause.


So, the reason why albums got split up into multiples, each with partial track lists compared to a full album, is that the Compilation check button (in the track details window) either doesn't work 100% of the time when it's used on the desktop, or the actual music file is unable to set this flag value (or doesn't have it). I've had this problem come up with both .mp3 and m4a encoded albums.


When the Compilation check button works for an album/song, you can see that it states that the album artist is "Various Artists" in the Music App UI if browsing by album, even though the actual files don't have that value encoded in their metadata. Albums that get split apart, have this flag active, but are split often based on artist name. So I added "Various Artists" to the Album Artist field in the track/album details window. This actually brought the various split albums back into one object in the Apple Music Library browser (Albums filter).


So if it's a bug, it seems like either someone who wrote the Music app routine is looking specifically for "Various Artists" in a metadata field, and not cross referencing if the file has a flag value for compilation (and if it's correctly set). This flag value seems to be somewhat non-standard and primarily used by Apple in the ID3v2 tags for the files. So it's understandable if it doesn't work sometimes. The ID3v2 tags also support fields like Album Artist Sort (TS02) or Artist Sort (TS0P) for the ID3 tag standard.


So I'm guessing that the original code for the Compilation flag sets either of these ID3v2 values either as "Various Artists", or based off of the most frequent artist of the album cited in the Artist (TPE1) value of each song's artist metadata (via a regex to parse multiple artists for a single song). This code block, or functionality is what's broken and causing the Music app on macOS and iOS (Haven't used the Windows version myself though) to display fragmented albums when browsing your own music library by album.

iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18

Posted on Apr 24, 2025 05:25 PM

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Split albums when browsing own/local library by album in Music (iOS and macOS) cause identified?

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