music app (not to be confused with apple music)

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JSM1976 Author

Level 1

15 points

music app (not to be confused with apple music)

this is an example of the issue I have everytime i add an album to the music app. lets say i download an album from bandcamp. when i add the album to the music app., i tend to clean up the metadata. meaning i cspitalize what needs to be capitalized and if it's a compilation, i'll check compilation within the "get info" menu. what's driving me nuts is once I'm finished formatting the album info to my liking, somehow the album is split up between multiple tracks of the same album all with the album art.

I've gone through the "sort as" but even when I have all the sorting formatted the same, there is always one track that will not conform. If I somehow manage to get that last track to live amounst the other, another track with remove itself from the list.

I know, weird.

IF someone out there has an idea of how to correct this, I'm all ears. To be upfront, I tried everything there is to try to include deleting and adding the album again.

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on May 24, 2020 11:51 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

turingtest2

Level 10

274,364 points

May 26, 2020 5:54 AM in response to JSM1976

If iTunes or Music shows multiple instances of an artist or an album then what generally works is to select all related tracks and use Get 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 application 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 iTunes Match 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 iTunes autocomplete from say Var... to Various Artists. Picking from the autocomplete lists seemed to work when pasting/editing the whole value didn't.

tt2

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