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

With so many people having this problem, and we are all paying for a service that does not work, maybe we should go for a class action lawsuit. Anyone knows a good lawyer?

Do you hear us Apple?

Steve Jobs, we miss you.

I agree but ultimately I just want it to work. Apple are probably oblivious to the grief they have caused. Surely their own employees and engineers would be active iOS users and some of them have services like match. I find it hard to believe they are not experiencing the same chaotic mess on the music apps. Apple pushed something via the cloud over the last few days which caused this mess - they need to fix it asap. We need to keep raising it to apple support, I have a case open but I suspect without others reporting multiple issues it won't get the attention it deserves.

But you are right, their has to be some legal ramification here, it's a paid service and it is not working as advertised - plus there is no word from apple to even acknowledge what is going on. I blame Apple Music for this mess, it's had a nasty side effect. Personally Apple Music isn't for me. All for innovation but not when it creates so many nasty bugs etc. It seems they are pushing on too fast whilst forgetting the core functions.

Refer to the below discussion. It doesn't sound like Apple is prepared to take this beyond the advisor stage, preferring to troubleshoot with scripted steps. Very frustrated as no amount of tinkering at home is going to fix this. Apple has pushed the mess through the cloud. It's upto them to fix this on their side. Not really acceptable for a paid subscription that is now not working as advertised.

Has iTunes match gone haywire?

Yup... this works.

• If you start by right click.. show in Finder that will give you an open Finder window from which you can drag them straight back in after deleting - plus allows you to check that all the files are in the right place and easy to copy back.
• after reimporting Album Artist is then useable without breaking everything again. I THINK it's okay to set before the export / delete / reimport. If so then you can fix your library first then just delete/reimport tracks in a batch.

Now if someone could write a script for it.... (beyond my skill set as it involves script that works in Finder too) ... perhaps just a script to save the files to a temporary location, delete them then copy them back to "Add to iTunes" or straight back into iTunes would do it. Then we could just process a lot of files at once.

It is still a huge bug though and very annoying. Standards seem to be slipping at the fruit-based hardware/software company... it really shouldn't be that hard to fix at their end

I did check out Amazon music service.... it seems a bit more reliable but I've not pursued it to far - I've got iPods/ATV etc. so it's a bit of a hassle. IF iOS 9 is as bad it may be time to re-consider my options

Has happened tome too as of yesterday. As with everyone else I have now got sit albums, mixed artists- eaes presenting as Buddy Holly!! Bet if you post as Taylor Swift it will get sorted in double quick time!! Very disappointed that Apple have t picked this up & acknowledged a problem. At least then we can wait it out rather than try to find fixes, depending on how savvy you are or how much time you have to stuff like that. Thought the whole idea was that 'it just works'!

Yep. Now I am affected too. And it even got worse over the past few days.

First I noticed a compilation that was completely messed up although I had perfectly tagged it in iTunes - over there, everything looked perfect. On the iPhone, the album was splitted into nearly 20 entries in my album list.

Initially, I thought it to be an iTunes Match problem and switched the service off on the phone, then switched it on again. Now A LOT of albums are split. I notice that it mostly affects compilations with various artists, but I also have several regular one-artist albums that are splitted, adding a second (wherever that one came from?!) album cover to it.

So, something's definitely wrong with iTunes Match and iOS. Looks like I don't have to call Apple's phone support since they obviously don't have a clue themselves. It took me ages to sort and tag my iTunes collection correctly - only to find that most of it is now a complete mess.

Am grateful for all your offered tricks and solutions but I think I'll wait till iOS 8.4 and hope they'll gonna fix it. Don't have time and am not in the mood to rearrange everything again, only to find out that it got messed up again the following day. Apple, YOU. SUCK.

Hi guys,

here Frankie.

I have the same issue.

On my MacBookPro Retina everything is ok but on my iPhone 6 Plus and on my iPod Touch the album are splitted! 😟

I'm waiting for a solution!

Hi guys,

I also have the problem on my iPhone 6 plus since one week or 2. It's funny but it's almost when I started to import CDs again (I've stopped for 6 months).

I had split albums, and for several cases I saw the same wrong artist.

I've deleted his albums, and since that moment I've no more split albums. I don't really know if it's related, but it works for me.

To get rid of the split albums, I've only deleted thme from iTunes Match, then reimported them.

GGlad that worked for you. I tried the delete from iCloud method on one artist that was split four times. It improved things a little in that he was only split twice on same album when I re imported. But he was still split so it didn't fix. Besides its happening on many many artists. Too many to try this for plus by deleting and re importing you lose ratings, play count history which I don't want to sacrifice. This needs an apple side fix as users on latest 8.3 iOS are getting impacted. hoping 8.4 when released will restore order

This has just started happening to me too – albums split up all over the place.

Can I suggest EVERYONE who reads this post, sends feedback to: http://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html (maddeningly, they don't include "Bug report" as an option for the type of feedback; "iTunes in the cloud" is the closest you'll get).

Also worth providing a link to this thread. Mass awareness is the only way this one's getting fixed.

This suddenly happened to mine yesterday. Abums are usually split into two three, usually with the bulk in the original artist's name, but with one or two other songs labelled as Various Artist or as some unrelated artist name (The Trashmen seems to show up most commonly...) in the Album view. Searching by album shows the error under the album section but correct in the song section. In the example below, "Diamonds On My Windshield" is the song that Match thinks is by The Trashmen, and you can see under songs that it's still tagged as Tom Waits. It's even weirder because I haven't even used the Album Artist tag for a lot of the stuff that's affected, and it would appear that it's Album Artist tagging that's getting mixed up in this example

I can only guess it probably has something to do with Apple trying to make Match compatible with Apple Music, and to be fair to them, I suppose there are likely to be teething problems with such a big overhaul to the software. I'm just going to have to wait and see whether 8.4 fixes the issue as I really don't have the time or inclination to re-upload well over 100 affected albums. It's already a pretty unreliable service, but unfortunately it's one I now depend upon.

I'm also guessing (hoping) that the stuff stored in iCloud is still tagged correctly, as it shows up fine on my Mac and under the song view, and this is purely an issue on the iOS end. I don't see why else iTunes would be getting it right and iOS messing it up.

Its for sure Apple is preparing for upgrade to Music, after i upgraded to 8.4 beta, the problem gone. But this is unacceptable, why the live database will affect by a beta testing version.😠 So many ppl are using 8.3 out there. Steve i missed u. 👿

Same issue here, only noticed it today though, it was working fine yesterday, all my albums were looking correct on my phone, go t listen to some music today and find that some of my albums have split into multiple of the same but with only some of the songs, so it seems to have split them?

I have just had a thorough look on my MBP as they are looking fine on there, checking the 'Get Info' option on the slip songs and everything is exactly the same, i have just tried making a small change to the album info and tried updating match but match will no longer update.

I was considering trying out the new music service until this happened......

Have the same annoying problem! what on earth is happening?! On my Mac everything seems to be fine and completely in order! using my appleTV, a lot of albums are torn apart, no alphabetical order and everything is mixed in a very special awkward way! PLEASE APPLE, DO STH!!!

Same problem today. Happened (seen first time) a few days ago. The funny thing is that the problen is different on iPhone and iPad. Splitted albums on iPhone are correct on iPad and splitted albums on iPad are correct on iPhone. I can´t see a rule that causes this issue. Try to reset and restore iPhone and will respond if successfull.