iTunes match - on iPhone iPad split albums and wrong album artists

Here is an alternative to stream your iTunes library over the internet and share it with friends and family.

I downloaded and setup the following:

- ServeToMe (free)

- StreamToMe for Mac (free)

- StreamToMe for iOS (paid)

ServeToMe streams my iTunes music library over the internet to StreamToMe on my iPhone. The streaming works very well. The library that shows up on my iPhone is exactly what I have in iTunes. The user interface is not as nice and you cannot download the music, so you always need an internet connection. But at least no more split albums.

Now I use iTunes Match only when I know I am going on a trip with no internet access (e.g. on the plane) so I pre-download the music I want. Otherwise, I use ServeToMe and StreamToMe. I did not try them over a data connection though.

StreamToMe needs my public IP address to reach my ServeToMe on my Mac at home. I do not have a registered domain name so I did the following:

1. I created a bash script to fetch my public IP address and store it in a text file in my DropBox folder on my Mac.

2. I registered the script with cron to run every 5 minutes so I always know my public IP where ever I am.

======= CREATE THE SCRIPT =========

(1). Create a file called myiptodropbox in /Users/<user_name>/bin

(2). In the file enter and save the script below

-------- SCRIPT STARTS HERE -------

#!/bin/bash

# This script fetches the public IP address and stores two copies on DropBox,

# one that is private and the other is shared with friends and family so they can

# reach my Mac and stream my music.

# Replace <user_name> with your user name and <folder> with a folder name of choice.

# The next command deletes the files to force DropBox to recognize the update

rm /Users/<user_name>/Dropbox/<folder>/private/publicip.txt

rm /Users/<user_name>/Dropbox/<folder>/shared/publicip.txt

# Fetch the public IP address

curl -s echoip.com > /Users/<user_name>/Dropbox/<folder>/private/publicip.txt

# Output the data into the shared file

cat /Users/<user_name>/Dropbox/<folder>/private/publicip.txt > /Users/<user_name>/Dropbox/<folder>/shared/publicip.txt

-------- SCRIPT ENDS HERE -------

(3). From a terminal command line do the following to make the script executable:

chmod 755 /Users/<user_name>/bin/myiptodropbox

====== REGISTER THE SCRIPT WITH CRON TO RUN EVERY 5 MINUTES ======

(4). From a terminal command line:

crontab -e

(5). A file opens, enter the line below into the file (if it opens in vi editor, hit "o" to enter the line)

*/5 * * * * /Users/<user_name>/bin/myiptodropbox

(6). Save the file (if using vi editor, hit "ESC" then ":x<ENTER>"

======= ROUTER SETUP ========

(7). If your router supports NAT-PMP then there is nothing you need to do on your router (as long as you do not have a default destination server other than your Mac that is hosting ServeToMe). Otherwise make sure the default TCP port 9969 is open towards your Mac at the router.

======= SHARE WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY =======

(8). Now give permissions to friends and family to read your shared DropBox folder (/Users/<user_name>/Dropbox/<folder>/shared/), and give them the ServeToMe user ID and password. They need to download StreamToMe and connect to your iTunes library.

In Finder right click on /Users/<user_name>/Dropbox/<folder>/shared/ and select "Share This Folder ..."

====== SUPPORT =====

Let me know if you run into problems 🙂

X!

Alternatively you can try Vox Loop: http://coppertino.com/loop-for-vox

According to the page description, it has following advantages that iTunes Match does not have:

1. no song or cloud storage limit

2. you can upload very high bit rates, no 256 kbps limit

3. no file type limit

4. free to trail for 14 days

And I think Vox's UI is much better than iTunes or Music app.

Disadvantages (I guess), I didn't try it

1. Is it realiable? What is its cloud network infrastructure look like?

2. No match, which means you need to upload everything, and you can't dry out your local low quality tracks via iTunes Match.

3. It is a very new service, just launched, may be tonz of bugs to be fixed

4. More expensive than iTunes Match.

Thanks S2S, I actually have all my music in ALAC and it seems VOX is the right application/service for streaming high quality audio. I am downloading it and will give it a try.

I can report, that Gary´s fix works for me ongoing.

Lucky me, I had just one album affected.

Since I fix this album, I have matched a couple of new albums with iTunes-match without any problem.

Just deleting the album from match and iTunes does´nt work here, of course.

I had to change the artist/album artist-tags before rematch.

This also happened me and has been a bugbear for two months.

I've nearly 22k of music in pristine filing condition and has been annoyance.

I first noticed it when I changed a Prince album from "The Artist formally.." back to Prince.

It then retagged all my Prince albums as based in the letter A.

Now I've been importing Dance mix CD's from well known DJ's (Paul van Dyk & Armin van Buuren) and have had them artist tagged all over the library - even have photos of completely different people in the artist column.

My only way out was to make a playlist of the album with it sorted in the correct order. It matched correctly then.

Ok, I have been having this problem and while searching, landed here. A quick read...and here is what I did. I am not using match, so I ruled that out. Problem appears to be the same though. Try this and see if it works for you. Find a song that is mixed into your list improperly. You should notice when you highlight it and click the artist, it falls somewhere in between a wrong artist. Now, click that song, click get info, then go to the sorting tab...a few lines down there is a sort by...Make sure you have the right artist in there. Please let me know if this worked for you...it did for me, but again, not the same exact issue.

After a lot of work with my big library this method worked. I hope it works for you.

Something's gone seriously wrong. Yesterday morning I went into the music app on my iPhone, I noticed a load of duplicating artists under the artists tab. It's a bit of a mess and happens for loads of them. What on earth has happened? I got home and looked at my iPad and launched the music app, at first it looked ok but then I noticed the data wheel spinning and after a few seconds the same mess. There are also various artists showing up under almost every letter too. Below you can see Adam and the Ants three times, duplicate for Bryan Ferry and for good measure a various artists thrown in when my setting is group by album artist, on iTunes the metadata is perfect (it's also listed normally on my apple TV) so it's just the iOS devices playing up. Have apple fiddled with something in the cloud because it only occurred yesterday morning (UK time) and my last match update on the computer was end of last week. Something they have done has messed it up. I tried to highlight Adam and the Ants on iTunes and re-edit the artist and album artist but it made no difference. It's a total shambles. I cannot be deleting all the affected artists from the cloud and then re-adding them, will take me forever -time I haven't got

I've found that if I have "Album is a compilation of songs by various artists" ticked AND have an Album Artist name, e.g. Now That's What I Call Music! as an Album Artist, then iTunes Match splits the albums for me.

Removing the Album Artist info corrects this.

I know this is a forum for us to exchange friendly advice, but honestly I'm so angry at Apple I can hardly breathe. I've spent untold hundreds of hours sorting out the metadata for my music how I want it and now iTunes Match has completely randomly screwed up all I've done and destroyed the hours I've put in. Artist information has reverted to original data, random artists have been introduced to existing albums, and the whole thing is completely, comprehensively, f****d up. And I am certainly not going to try and sort out my entire library (and it is the ENTIRE library) from scratch again. Not a word from Apple themselves, of course. But this makes my blood boil like I can't remember when. So f**k you Apple.

IIt's an awful mess. A few of us are commenting on another thread Has iTunes match gone haywire?

sseems something has happened in the last couple of days to screw this up for everyone. Only seems to be impacting iOS devices. On iTunes everything looks normal (all metadata correct) and even my old Apple TV is fine. But iOS is another story. Other family members and friends I know who use match are seeing the same crop up. I think it's a pretty widespread issue and people are beginning to slowly notice and/or comment. Nothing works, disabling and re enabling match, blanking artist and album artist out and then re editing it Etc etc. tried it all. Apple have glitches something, I suspect imminent apple music has created this nasty side effect. Obviously not impressed, I have no desire to subscribe to apple music as I rarely buy new songs so paying a tenner a month makes no sense to me. itunes match fits my needs perfectly or it did until this debacle. I have raised with apple support but I do wonder if it will get given much priority. I have pointed their attentions to this forum and said I think the issue is much widerspread than anyone may suspect.

i Am seeing split albums all over the place, duplicate artists, artists under wrong letter, various artists listing popping up under most letters full of songs seemingly random grouped together. It's horrific to look through. So so disappointed at this. I think we should all contact apple support and raise more awareness and add pressure to sort this out. It must be a simple fix on their side to push things correctly from the cloud again. It just needs the attention it deserves

I had this issue back in May - spent so many hours with apple technicians on the phone, remote assistance on my machine and still nobody was able to come up with a solution, or even detect the issue. Poor customer service from apple resulted in a £50 itunes voucher and a refund of Match.

Doesn't pose very well for the upcoming Apple Music......hope that service is more reliable!

SO it never got fixed for you? This is pretty shocking - the fact a number of us are all suddenly seeing this must mean Apple has glitched on their side. I hope!!!

I am having exactly the same problem.

I archived a bunch of my old CDs last weekend. The imported albums showed up nicely on iTunes library as complete albums. However, on the phone it was a complete mess. The albums were split up. The compilations were hit particularly hard. It was a terrible mess - my music library on the phone was not usable.

I spent the entire night

(1) rebooting the device and laptop

(2) turning iTunes Match on and off

(3) deleting and re-downloading music from laptop to device, manually syncing the device from the iTunes library

(4) manually checking metadata of the songs (sort as album & sort as artist) within the split albums and making them uniform

After several hours, I found that the following would work

(1) turn off iTunes Match

(2) Turn off "show music not on device"

(3) delete all split albums

(4) manually add the desired albums manually via USB cable from iTunes Library

DO NOT TURN iTunes Match BACK ON!!

If you accidentally turned it back on, the albums will scramble again!

You may need to reboot the device between steps (3) and (4)

Until iOS is fixed up on the iTunes Match, I will not be using iTunes Match. (I use iTunes Match mostly for archival purposes as I have iTunes at work and at home and it's handy to download albums on demand)

specs:

iOS 8.3 iTunes 12.1.2.27 64bit iPhone 6

hope this helps.

This has been annoying me for a few months now. The only solution I've found is to totally remove album artist on any albums that split. This is only happening on iPhone and iPad, iTunes looks fine.