Grouping tracks & artists in Music Player - an iOS 6 problem?

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lars1950 Author

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10 points

Grouping tracks & artists in Music Player - an iOS 6 problem?

I have my music library in iTunes 11.01 on a Windows XP machine. The library is synched to an iPAD 4 (iOS 6.1) and an iPhone 4 (iOS 5.1.1). No jailbreaking.

My library is a mix of ripped CD music, all in Apple Lossless (created inside iTunes), and songs purchased from iTunes Store.

Everything works and looks fine in iTunes, but after synching I get surprising results on the IPAD such as:

- Albums "falling apart" into separate smaller albums, e.g., after adding tracks to existing albums

- Album content being "sucked up" by another album from the same artist

- Album names or artists being blanked, i.e., "unknown artist" or "unknown album".

- Albums invisible and content not searchable

I have applied the various excellent advices by turingtest 2 (http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp) but it helps only up to a point. Often, I find I need to modify the album name to force iTunes to take notice and act on the various changes I made, e.g., grouping by album artist.

For certain albums, nothing helps - they persist in showing up as several covers. I have spent a lot of time on this, including carefully checking the contents of the iTunes library folder on the PC.

Notably; This is all on the iPAD, on iOS 6.1 (previosly 6.0.1; same issues). My iPhone 4, on iOS 5.1.1, gets it right all the time, every time: No issues!

I have read many complaints about the Music Player in iOS 6, including disappointment that 6.1 was no different, but I'm not aware of anyone reporting this particular problem/bug.

A couple of questions:

1) Is this an iPAD issue or one associated with iOS 6.1? I will keep 5.1.1. on my iPhone until this question has been answered.

2) Is Apple aware - is a fix underway?

3) Is there a better Music Player available, e.g., on App Store (one that can handle thousands of songs, generally doing the same things but better and more robust)

iPad, iOS 6.1, 4:th generation

Posted on Feb 7, 2013 1:20 PM

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Answer 1

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lars1950 Author

Level 1

10 points

Feb 17, 2013 4:45 AM in response to lars1950

I have found a work-around; Let me share it with the community.

The remaining issue, after applying the good advice by turingtest2 (above) was duplicates appearing in the album view on the iPAD. That means complete duplicate albums (all tracks present, in all of copies) appearing on various places, up to more than 10 times.

The cause:

iTunes and/or the iTunes/iPAD sync procedure and/or the file system on the iPAD reacted like this on duplicate tracks (exact same track name, and artist name, present in differernt albums, e.g., once on the original album and then one more time on a compilation album).

The fix: Make a cosmetic change to the track or artist name on one of the occurrences.

I challenge Apple to track down & fix the root cause.

At the same time, they can fix the various idiosyncrasies described by turingtest2, and give us back the nice genre/album view that we had on iOS 5.

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