Help! itunes 12 splitting all my albums up

...thank you for your response, I tried your suggestion *again* and suddenly turning off "share library details with apple" was the solution :-).

(Unfortunately I had to edit hundreds of album informations/metadata (5 hours of work) to bring the metadata to the desired state :-((.

I think apple changes the metadata in the files and not in the library=database. itunes still displays the albums according to the user-edited metadata UNTIL a "metadata-changed" track is played.

On playing a "changed" file, the database immediately reads the changed metadata and "acts"=sorts accordingly to the changed data, which leads to splitting the albums. The played tracks sort according to apple´s metadata and the non-played tracks stay sorted according to the user-edited metadata.

After havingg played back all (changed) tracks, the metadata is now 100% conform to apple´s metadata and therefore the album is no longer split.... but now every track has lost the the user-defined metadata.

Apple should prevent this behaviour, at least with a warning when enabling the "share library details....".

THX again for your help!

Ah, I haven't used the share details option. Perhaps that does indeed change the tags themselves. 😮

Should you find yourself in this position again I have a script called ExportImport which may let you export the correct metadata from an older library file and then import it into the current one.

tt2

Possible solution:

to solve this problem, you need to go to the "my music" tab and then select the tracks that you wish to collate. proceed to right click on them and select "get info" there will be a checkbox on the window that appears that says "Compilation: Album is a compilation of songs by various artists" selecting this will collate the tracks even if the artist names don't match, this should solve the problem. for some reason the checkbox only appears when you select get info on multiple items in the "my music" tab and nowhere else, so this is important.

"for some reason the checkbox only appears when you select get info on multiple items in the "my music" tab and nowhere else"

The Album is compilation ... checkbox should always be available. In some of the recent 12.x releases it may be necessary to scroll down the Get Info window, or drag a corner to enlarge it, to show the checkbox.

Hello Maff,

I had this issue too with a single album. In the "my music" tab I changed the view to "songs" found the album that had been split, selected all songs in that album, cmd-I and found that under the "sorting" tab the album displayed as "mixed". I change this suit and voila!

This problem is really getting on my nerves now. Half the times I rip a cd I have to spend several minutes repeatedly renaming albums and re-entering artist names etc to get it to stop splitting tracks off randomly for no reason.

It seems sometimes it's to do with how iTunes handles alphabetical case - it seems as if in some ways it ignores upper/lower case differences in names, but in other ways it doesn't. To make it far more annoying the auto-correct loves to automatically change the case of what you type, sometimes making it almost impossible to enter things in the correct case, as, for example, it will insist on converting everything to ALL CAPS as you type it, until you manage to find a way to trick it into letting you keep the lower case letters you actually entered.

But that's not the whole reason. In particular it loves to split off only the first track from albums, requiring you to rename the album for that track to something silly (e.g. "stop doing this, itunes!") then rename it back to the correct name before it will relent and put the album back together again.

With a few albums I've had to mess about with them for 10 minutes before it eventually accepted it was one single album and put all the tracks together - its like herding cats.

Correct the data before you rip it.

iTunes will only offer ALL CAPS versions of certain strings if they are already present in your library. Clean up with the script TitleCase.

If/when you see that one track that won't merge try closing iTunes and reopening as this sometimes fixes it, otherwise add a trailing X to the principle fields, Artist, Album & Album Artist, click OK, then remove it again.

tt2

The data was correct before ripping, though, it still does weird things to it, especially with the first track of any album.

This is with re-ripping albums that are already in the library (and correct - that's another thing that's weird about iTunes treatment of case, when re-ripping it recognises tracks are the same track even if the case is different, but then treats the albums as different because of different case in the artist name - though it still does that sometimes when there is no upper/lower case issue)

As for the ALL CAPS, I realise there must be an all caps version somewhere in the library, but what is exasperating is iTunes doesn't give me a choice, as I type in lower case it changes it to the caps version even if there's a hundred tracks where the artist name isn't in capitals and just one lurking somewhere where it is. And there's no way to over-ride it .

And even if I select - from the drop-down list of suggestions - the non-caps version, it completely ignores me and uses the capitalised one anyway!

I think the underlying problem is that some parts of the iTunes code base treat upper and lower case as different, while other parts think they are the same.

jfgvui wrote:

As for the ALL CAPS, I realise there must be an all caps version somewhere in the library, but what is exasperating is iTunes doesn't give me a choice, as I type in lower case it changes it to the caps version even if there's a hundred tracks where the artist name isn't in capitals and just one lurking somewhere where it is. And there's no way to over-ride it .

In a case-sensitive sort, capitals come first. A workaround to get what you want is to start with a leading X, then remove it when you've typed everything else. But if you fix up all the existing content then you should only be offered sensible suggestions in future.

tt2

OMG! The solution for merging split albums worked! I was so frustrated about certain albums having the first song split into a separate album and could not figure out how to merge them. But temporarily renaming the album name and then reverting back to the original name did the trick. Thank you!!!!

Now on to fixing the all-CAPs problem.....

Apple, please fix these issues so that the users don't have to waste time editing their music files. Could this be something to do with the size of the music library and/or the size of lossless music files? I didn't use to see this problem when my library was smaller; however, that was using older versions of iTunes as well.

Ah! Renaming the errant All CAPs title or artist by starting out with Xx and then removing the Xx from the beginning did the trick. E.g., the artist name showed up initially as CAN and by renaming it to XxCan I was able to get lowercase letters into the name. Deleting Xx then kept the name in the correct format. Of course, the first song then split off into a separate album, but by renaming this new album and then reverting back to the original name re-merged all the tracks. Thank you jfgvui and turingtest2!! Much obliged.

🙂

tt2

Hi, I'm having a similar track data problem and I wondered if anyone could help?

My track data is fine in iTunes - everything is tagged as I want it i.e. all in title case and all my sort data is correct.

However, as soon as I transfer data to my iOS device, the track data and capitalisation for some songs changes. These changes only show up on iOS - all my track data remains correct in iTunes. It's like iCloud is interfering with the Music app on iOS and replacing my own customized track data with that from the iTunes Store.

I've tried everything I can think of - turning off iCloud on iOS and PC, signing out of iTunes, doing a backup and restore. I don't know what else to try?

If the problems revolve around store purchases then go to iTunes > Preferences > Store and turn off

• Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases
• Share details about your library with Apple

And on any iOS device go to Settings > Music and turn off

Show All Music

Close and reopen iTunes and/or reset the device and you should see your version of the metadata for each track rather than the original store data.

If .mp3 files are involved then the issue could be multiple embedded tags where one gets updated when you make a change, but iTunes or any device may later read back unchanged data from another. A workaround in iTunes is to use right-click context menu Convert ID3 Tags... > None a few times to remove all existing tags and then Convert ID3 Tags... > v2.3 to build a fresh tag with the information still held in the iTunes database. I've read in the past that iTunes isn't fully compliant with the v2.4 spec. although this may no longer be the case, however support for v2.3 is widespread so I would suggest using v2.3 over v2.4. Note this process removes any embedded artwork and only works with files in .mp3 format.

Although I'm beginning to get a suspicion from another thread that purchases on iOS 8.3 may still magically revert to original metadata on a whim. 😮

tt2

Thanks so much for your help - I was thinking I would never get this problem solved. I already had all those settings turned off; it was the mp3 files that were the problem. I created AAC versions of some of the files I was having problems with and this seems to have solved the issue for now.

In relation to iOS 8.3 changing metadata and artwork, you might find this page http://www.mcelhearn.com/when-ios-devices-replace-artwork-for-some-of-your-album s/ helpful. I came across it just after posting my original post.