How do I stop my iTunes splitting an album?

iTunes will group albums if:

• all tracks have the same value in the Artist field and the same value in the Album field, or
• all tracks have the same value in the Album Artist field and the same value in the Album field, or
• all tracks have the same value in the Album field and have the Album is a compilation ... flag checked

There also seems to be a lurking bug in iTunes 12 such that albums may not group correctly even if one of these rules appear to be satisfied. To resolve this:

• select all tracks that should be part of a common album
• right-click > Get Info
• edit the Album field, inserting a "dummy" character at the start or end of the value (e.g., change "Dark Side of the Moon" to "xDark Side of the Moon"
• the album should now group correctly - you can then repeat the operation to remove the "dummy" character.

Hi,

I've got the same problem on my iPhone 6 after upgrading to 8.3. The music app started to mess up my albums by replicating the albums up to 18 times for the very worst one. Mostly they are just duplicated. But it also doesn't happen to all. Well, replicate and duplicate are actually not the right words. They've got split in a very abstract way. Like the first one contains nearly everything but song 3, 7, 9, 17 & 22, which are grouped to the second album with same name and cover. Or in another one it's a sequentially ordered snip of the album from song 3 to 10. And it's mostly compilations. But also here, not all of them and not only compilations. And NO, it's not a problem with iTunes on my Mac. All albums are looking perfectly fine in there! But doing a full sync from iTunes to the phone doesn't help either.

And now make a guess what happened on my iPad after the update... bingo, the same. But it would be probably to simple if it would affect the same albums as on my iPhone, right? Some of them are the same, but it does actually seem to be coincidence.

All of them have been purchased through the iTunes store and interestingly when I delete them from the device and then enable the "show all music" button in the music settings to see also all icloud music which is not downloaded to the device, it's still the same. Also the cloud side album is split the same way! Downloading it again doesn't change anything. This is really annoying and I would appreciate a solution which doesn't mean to completely reset my devices.

I have the exact same issue. Ever since I updated to 8.3, my music library is completely messed up.

To make things super clear, I made a few screenshots.

This is what I see in my Music App, on my iPhone 6 Plus right now.

My set up in iTunes, on my iMac is "clean" as far as I can see. All albums or songs have been properly named and renamed and there's no reasons that iTunes would do this.

I'm a little OCD and this is driving me completely nuts.... Please help.

You shouldn't try to use sort values to link different values together. Your artist sort as field should be empty, or mixed.

Actually since this stuff is all shown with cloud links you don't appear to be working with your own files. And if the iTunes Store has tried to ram the Album Artist value in as Sort Artist then it proves that they don't know how the software actually works. 😕

tt2

I tried something different few minutes ago as I really was going to freak out...

I completely deleted ALL the music from my iPhone. Everything. Turned "Show all music" off so that the device stops looking stuff up in the cloud and I then ran a full sync out of iTunes.

Now, it's looking perfectly fine again on the phone. But that's of course only a 'solution' in case you have your full set of music in iTunes.

But then I was interested to see what's happening after activating 'Show all music' back again. And the album view stays ordered, so far.

By looking into the 'Title' view, it's different. Now you can see one and the same song twice! The first one is already on the device (the one synced through iTunes earlier), the second does show the cloud icon so it's not downloaded from the cloud yet.

Interestingly, when now looking into the 'Album' view, you can see the songs to be also duplicated within the same album, so it's at least no longer getting split, but the Cloud version of one song is still not being recognized to be exactly the same as already present on the device. Then I noticed that there are still two split albums. So, it really seems Apple is doing strange stuff to their music library. Might be that once they completed that, the final solution would be to delete everything from the phone and from iTunes as well (to also clean that side up) and to download a 'fresh version' from the store then.

Let's see... But one thing is obvious, and that is turingtest2's statement.