Song tags are on iPhone are inconsistent and wrong versus on Mac.

I've been having issues with the tags for a while, but it's really bothering me now. An example of the issue, and it is certainly not the case for all, or even most of my library. Despite all the tag fields I can see being correct, I have two albums from the same artist appearing as one album on the phone. The track numbers are still correct too, so it'll play track 1 of one album, then track 1 of the other, and back and forth. The album name will change between tracks, as will the album artwork, but they display, and play, as one album.


It's bizarre that the phone seems to deal with sorting albums differently based on tags than the Mac App does in the first place, but this doesn't seem to work at all, and I can't figure out why. They're not even the same format, one album is MP3, the other is ALAC. And they are updating, I can add a letter to the album title and sync, and it updates, but still considers them a single album.


Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

iPhone XS

Posted on Jul 31, 2019 4:21 AM

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Posted on Jul 31, 2019 9:53 AM

Try the technique for stripping multiple tags out of the mp3 files, add artwork back again, remove both albums from your device, add them back one at a time. What are the titles by the way? Something like Album and The Album, while different visually could end up with the same internal sort value. Not had to do it on the iPhone for some time, as far as I know, but the iPod classic would lump all Greatest Hits albums together, for example, regardless of album artist, so in my library any such album title is changed to <Album> - <Album Artist> so that album titles are guaranteed to be unique.


tt2

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 31, 2019 9:53 AM in response to c0032

Try the technique for stripping multiple tags out of the mp3 files, add artwork back again, remove both albums from your device, add them back one at a time. What are the titles by the way? Something like Album and The Album, while different visually could end up with the same internal sort value. Not had to do it on the iPhone for some time, as far as I know, but the iPod classic would lump all Greatest Hits albums together, for example, regardless of album artist, so in my library any such album title is changed to <Album> - <Album Artist> so that album titles are guaranteed to be unique.


tt2

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Song tags are on iPhone are inconsistent and wrong versus on Mac.

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