iOS 7 renames albums purchased from iTunes Store

I'm glad I'm not alone in having this issue.

It's basically really bad product design. For those of us who want to edit tags, it should be respected across all devices.

To the point about Apple needing the data to identify purchased tracks, the whole mechanism that has been identified as being at work here is the reason why it's not necessary - there's already additional metadata in the files that allows them to do that. It's how they are overriding the tags in the first place even though you've made your customisations.

iTunes has this so well handled that when it needs to update the file of a previously purchased track (I don't know why but this happens but iTunes downloads new files for existing tracks every so often) it will add your custom tags to the new file before removing the old one so you don't notice the change. Slightly spooky but sophisticated and exactly how things should be.

An alternative solution: use a tag editor like The Tagger or Subler to remove the additional metadata used by iTunes. I don't know if it works but The Tagger has a specific feature to "Delete Personal Data" that removes most of that. I haven't had a chance to test it yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked.

Ultimately just so unnecessary in the first place, if only someone at Apple could make the Music app behave correctly in the first place...

Just to round off my comment, I can confirm that the removal of the personal data seems to work. I strongly dislike tinkering with the files like this and it's still time consuming considering it shouldn't be necessary at all, but this does mean that the audio quality is unaffected (unlike converting the file to a new format).

I don't know if there are any further implications so I'd always recommend treading carefully. I also don't know if this plan will survive a Saturday as described in other comments, but I didn't need to sign out or anything like that to fix this issue so I imagine it will be ok.

Cheers all.

Very cool. Let us know whether you see this happen again. I figure, if it does, it'll happen in about a week.

I'm very interested in what you say, because I had had a similar thought recently: suppose I remove the iTunes-specific ID3 tags from the MP3 files of albums I've purchased -- would that make a difference? Out of curiosity, I have removed some tags from some files in different combinations, and I am waiting for Saturday to come around again in order to see what happens differently, if anything, to the tracks I've altered. Does removing one or more or some combination of them discourage iTunes from meddling? Perhaps I'll get nowhere, but I figure there's no harm in experimenting.

Great that you've tried the same. I'm pretty confident that it will work based on everything we've talked about, although there may yet be more hidden data in the files and I guess we don't really know which are the critical metadata that allow this bizarre "feature" to function.

I have to say I always thought that the tags that showed up in Music were in the file from the point of purchase and just hidden from view, and I'd hoped to find a tag editor that would find and remove them. I was amazed to read this thread as the steps you've gone through really prove that the information is actually downloaded when it connects to Apple servers, and not only that but it does it every single time you connect *and* there's a background task that runs on a Saturday!

I really can't see what purpose all this serves. If all they had was a unique file identifier, and even my iTunes account identifier, in the file then that would be fine with me - I'm not opposed to that information being in the file per se. But overwriting my preferred tags... I don't get it.

This past Saturday, all of my purchased tracks got renamed again. Apparently, none of my changes to ID3 tags made any difference at all. So much for that experiment.

Puzzlingly, iTunes is leaving some of my albums alone but not others, and I don't know what is making the difference. I removed some ID3 tags from some of my iTunes purchases, then waited to see which ones iTunes would monkey with. It monkeyed with some and not with others, but the changes that I made to ID3 tags didn't seem to have any bearing on which ones got changed and which ones didn't. *headscratch*

Meanwhile:

On Sunday, after reading various reviews about iTunes 12, I made the leap. I read that the UI has changed, but it didn't seem so drastic that I would regret the upgrade. Well, it turns out that the Get Info dialog box no longer recognizes any keyboard shortcut for moving from the current track to the next one. There is a "Previous" and a "Next" button on that Get Info dialog, but they're no longer named "Previous" and "Next" -- now they're labeled "<" and ">" and (on Windows, anyway) the "Alt+N" keyboard shortcut is no longer recognized as a shortcut for anything. I tried some other combinations, hoping that maybe the ">" key would be recognized as an alternative but ... nope. Furthermore, I can't click on the ">" button and, say, hold down the mouse in order to race through all of the Purchased tracks the way I used to do.

At the moment, I'm waiting until Saturday to see if iTunes 12 does this to me again. It would be lovely to discover that iTunes 12 fixes this whole problem by leaving my renamed albums alone, but my hopes are not high. If iTunes does its weekly track-and-album-rename on Saturday, my nifty trick of racing through all of the Purchased tracks to Get Info all of them isn't going to work, and I'm going to need to find some other solution to this dilemma.

Call me old school, but I think that any time you take away a keyboard shortcut such that you've left me no way to interact with your user interface except with the mouse, that's a bad design decision that you should urgently reconsider.

I'm also extremely frustrated with my metadata changes not being respected on the iPhone...

It means that the iPhone is not suitable for listening to classical music (as the normal approach is to sort with composer field, and therefore one needs to blank out the composer field for all non-classical music on one's collection - at least that's my approach).

Paul

Crossing my fingers, but it seems like this hasn't been happening since I upgraded to 64-bit iTunes 12.1. Until recently, I've been expecting this to happen once a week, usually on Saturdays, sometimes Sunday or even Monday, but always about a week apart -- but it's been almost three weeks since this has happened last, if I'm remembering correctly. Certainly it's been more than two.

Today is a Saturday. If it's going to happen, I expect it today or tomorrow. If by the middle of this coming week it still hasn't happened, I'm going to stop holding my breath apprehensively. I hope I'm not declaring victory prematurely, but it certainly seems as if something has changed in this regard.

Is this issue still happening to any of the rest of you? And do you find that iTunes 12.1 fixes the problem? Or am I just imagining things?

This is not just an iOS problem. On both my laptop and my desktops, running SnowLeopard and Lion, purchased tracks that I have carefully renamed (because Apple's names are inadequate, inconsistent, and often incorrect!) get periodically restored to their original faulty names. (Perhaps every Saturday? I must check that out...) Opening the Info window on any track restores my changes, as does simply doubleclicking on it, but seriously!? Why do they do this?

If Apple had a dedicated team of scholars and musicologiest keeping their track/album/performer names up to high standards, I might be able to understand their meddling (though I would still probably prefer my own idiosyncratic names), but given the slipshod way the iTunes Store is run, it feels like corporate authoritarianism for its own sake.

Another annoying development is that iTunes on the desktop that is running Lion has decided to organize subfolders, not alphabetically (that would be too rational), but by date last edited.

I'm guessing that there is no way to fix the renaming issue (except by making new versions and deleting the old—a long job!)

Is there some way of reorganizing the folders in iTunes as I want them, and not as Apple has decreed that they shall be?