Sorting is terribly broken: Apple Music's custom Album Artist and Artist sort fields not consistently honored in same program or across platforms

So I figured this out.

Bob Marley & The Wailer's "Legend" was one of my albums with a botched Album Artist sort. It kept showing up under B in Library->Artists instead of M.

Coincidentally I noticed I had songs downloaded from 3 other albums of his that weren't in my Library... or so I thought. They were in Apple's Roots Reggae Essentials playlist.

On a whim I removed the playlist from my Library and instantly Bob Marley sorted correctly in Library->Artists.

So yeah, metadata from songs in random Apple Music playlists that you add to your library will apparently always botch your custom sort order. And the metadata in those songs is not editable.

Definitely still a bug, but it's nice to know finally what's going on and why it appears so random.

I suppose I'll file a feedback now to close the loop.

Interesting! Unfortunately that didn't work for me. Removing the Album Artist did not re-set John Mayer's position sorting position.

I also changed the Artist name to "Mayer, John" and it resorted into the Ms immediately. However, switching it back to the proper "John Mayer" with "Mayer, John" as the custom sort immediately placed it back in the Js, despite my custom sort.

So strange!

Thank you for the detailed response.

Unfortunately I've already hidden all of my past purchases, so that shouldn't be affecting things. Also, I've never purchased a John Mayer album. My collection consists of 99% modern Apple Music streaming files (with a few rare gems imported from CD, none at issue here).

I tried the repairing permissions trick and then editing the sort order for John Mayer again. Interestingly, the sort did not respond immediately, but upon re-opening Apple Music he finally showed correctly under M for Mayer!

Also interestingly, Apple Music no longer links him with their cloud-based John Mayer. He no longer has a profile icon in the Artists view, even though his actual artist name is still John Mayer.

So weird. I appreciate the flexibility Apple is giving us, but man, this is buggy as ****.

So in the end I didn't appreciate that the legit Apple Music files were now "unlinked" from Apple Music, at least in the Artists view. So I removed the albums from my Library entirely, rebooted, and redownloaded them.

Now John Mayer sorts properly when adding Mayer, John as the Album Artist sort field. Bob Marley & The Wailers, however, demands to be sorted under B no matter what I do, or how many times I remove the album and re-add it.

Also Music crashed twice during all of this, and split a few of my existing & unrelated-to-all-this albums into multiple entries.

THANKS APPLE!

Finally, custom covers is actually one of my more successful edits. For the most part I'm able to get the covers I want synced to all my devices, overriding the Apple Music covers. It often takes 2-3 attempts though.

Thanks, yeah I see the split album issue every few months so fixing it is second nature now. Interestingly, one of the John Mayer albums I re-added instantly split upon adding to my library, with one of the split tracks that was added being a single that isn't even available in my region to download, and that also was never even a track on the album to begin with. Man, I should have taken a screenshot of that before fixing it. The album was continuum.

I'm beginning to suspect Apple's entire database has no actual primary keys or unique IDs for albums/songs, and everything is actually just a house of cards built on carefully crafted artist/album name queries that power users see fail in way too many corner cases. Well, I know it falls apart for everyone, but we're the only ones who notice! 😜

Haha yup, Herbie's out of order. Darn, the cause I identified is not triggering the issue 100% of the time. He IS correctly sorted on macOS in Library->Artists, but not on iOS, and both have the "Jazz in Spatial Audio" playlist with a few extra Herbie Hancock songs. Sigh... I'm giving up on this. It's not like an actual human will ever read my Feedback that I filed anyway.

Feedback submitted: FB11605318