Apple Music Showing Duplicated Albums on macOS

You're welcome. Albums can sometimes break up on iOS too, in which case removing from the device and adding back from the library will usually sort it out. Here's a personal example in iTunes that has just happened while upgrading some of my tracks to lossless versions of the same album. In this case I only needed to apply the trailing X trick to the album title. I'm using the Column Browser view in Songs here which is really handy for stepping through one album after another to spot issues you might want to correct.

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This is a long standing behaviour with both iTunes and Apple Music. Sometimes it is caused by inconsistent metadata, but it seems also to arise randomly as items are added to the database and iTunes/Music fails consolidate two separate groups of items under one entry when they have matching details that should merge them together. No amount of restarting the app or hoping that Apple will address this issue. (Note it goes back to at least 2007 which is when I started finding workarounds for it.) If you want a tidier library you'll need to do a little housekeeping. Select both covers, or all the tracks that belong together in say the songs view, press Cmd+I, add an extra character to the Album, Album Artist, and, if appropriate, Artist field, click OK, press Cmd+I again, edit out the bonus characters you added and press OK again. Works practically every time and preserves all of the original metadata. If the artist is displayed differently on different albums you might want to choose one version to standardise on, but that is next level OCD. For me, everything needs to be in Title Case, all initial capitals with very rare exceptions, but I need my library to be just so.

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

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