Songs that have had their metadata changed in iTunes have disappeared from my iPhone

Happened to me today...oh god it's a mess I edited so much songs name... but I have random songs I didnt edited the name showing ''countinuous'' too... I hate apple music right now 😟

This isn't the same issue, as the only tracks affected in this case are those in Apple Music where the names have been changed in iTunes. iTunes Match has a whole raft of different issues, but they are not related. I, in any case, have never unsubscribed from iTunes Match. As far as I am concerned, the problem is containable because a quick highlighting in iTunes of all the tracks on any given album, then changing the artist name, album title and the "of,,," track number and then changing them back to the actual metadata does the trick of re-combining the tracks into an album with the right name, artist and track number. It's a bit fiddly but it only takes a minute or so for any given album. It should be a straightforward software fix for Apple to stop iTunes from deleting Apple Music metadata in all fields when the track name is changed - it never used to happen so something that was changed in Apple Music around the time of the iOS9.1 rollout must be causing the problem. Turning off iTunes in the Cloud on my devices is a real pain, because it deletes all downloaded tracks, and I have about 90GB of music locally stored on my iPhone (and another 60GB or so on my iPad) so I'll put up with almost anything to avoid having to go through the process of downloading that again.

You're correct. I reset my iCloud Music Library per these instructions and the bug still happens.

I've had to slightly modify your solution in situations where there are multiple artists in one album. And sometimes the changes don't take and have to be repeated, as if there are too many updates to Apple's servers sometimes and the overflow is lost.

I also noticed the time length of tracks is often lost in iOS when you change the track name. Any solution for that?

I haven't found any solution to the loss of track length data - it clearly gets deleted (along with all the other metadata) when the track name of any Apple Music track is changed, but because you can't re-input it manually, it stays deleted. It does still show up when the track is played, however. Where there are multiple artists I agree it is more labour-intensive, as you need to change each artist's name to something else and back individually. As long as the "more than one artist" checkbox is ticked, though, I find albums then stay together after the changes have been made.

Been dealing with this for some time now - VERY frustrating.

I took some time over the holiday break to correct all my Apple Music metadata that was corrupted by the "change the track name" issue.

This workaround will get all your metadata back to where it's supposed be - including track length - on all your machines/devices. (Note: this process is a MAJOR pain and took me several sessions to get through all my affected songs.)

1. On your Mac OS X machine, click the cloud icon to download the affected album/songs to your local hard drive.

2. Once all tracks have downloaded, on your iOS device, click the "..." and select "Delete from My Music".

3. After the next sync, the album and its tracks on your Mac OS X machine will now have an iCloud status of "Removed".

4. On your Mac OS X machine, edit your song names to your heart's content.

5. After you've finished editing, select the album/songs and option-click, then choose "Add to iCloud Music Library".

6. After the next sync, your edited song titles (and all other metadata) will now appear on your iOS device(s).

Rinse. Repeat.

Going forward, any time I add a new album, I'm sure to download it first locally on my Mac OS X machine, delete the album from iOS device, edit song names, and finally re-add it to my iCloud Music Library. While major headache, it does keep things straight until Apple fixes this bug on their end.

Hopefully, that all makes sense 🙂

I just tested this on Barbra Streisand's "Guilty Pleasures" album and it didn't work for me. About half of the tracks on this album are with Barry Gibb, so I changed the artist field on those tracks to accurately reflect this. When I did this before using the known fix, I was able to get the tracks to be listed under separate artist names correctly in iOS. But using this new method, all the tracks are lumped together with only Barbra Streisand as the artist in one album and my artist metadata changes were ignored.

Your method does appear to work, however, for tracks in albums that don't contain multiple artists. Song title changes, track length, artist, and album association all appear to be preserved.

Also, in your final step, I'm sure you meant to say "right-click" (or control-click) as "option-click" in iTunes doesn't do anything. You also forgot to add the final step of right-clicking on those same tracks in iTunes and choosing "Remove Download" so that the tracks are as they were before, not taking up space on your machine.

On second look, this may be working correctly. Apple Music appears to be grouping the album now by what appears in the "Album Artist" field instead of the Artist field. Because I have the Album Artist field correctly filled in as Barbra Streisand for all these tracks, that's what Artist heading Apple Music is putting it under. And, in fact, when a track is played, the artist playing will change to indicate "Barbra Streisand & Barry Gibb" for the duet tracks correctly. This is exactly how it should work. I was not aware Apple Music had made the switch to list albums by Album Artist again, the way the app used to work before Apple Music came along.

Another related issue I'm dealing with since all this started to happen is the following:

When the "Album", "Artist" or "Album Artist" metadata modifications consist only on adding or removing wrong or missing accents (e.g. Maria > María, Angel > Ángel, etc., which is extremely common in Spanish), these changes are skipped by Apple Music, leaving the metadata unchanged on iOS, but modified on the OS X device I have made the correction in.

All this metadata stuff is extremely frustrating for those who use tools as LastFM, in which the tag accuracy has to be perfect to keep on doing its job.

Got bored and installed the 9.3 beta in hopes this bug may have been addressed, but no dice. Sent a tweet to the AppleMusicHelp twitter account, I suggest anyone else on twitter who has this problem do the same.

I did and they said to not edit metadata anymore...😠

I dunno. Keep bugging them until they give you an answer that isn't useless. I mean, the software lets you do it, so you should be able to do so, especially since song and artist tagging on all streaming services is really, really terrible and often hard to read (try going through Grateful Dead live tracks easily. It's awful).

I do it to keep both my last.fm profile and OCD consistent. 😁

I've gotten that response before in a chat with Apple Support, which really makes my blood boil because it's basically the punchline from this old joke:

Patient: Doc, it really hurts when I move my arm this way.

Doctor: Well, then stop moving your arm that way.

Sounds about right.

The sad part is that the ability to manage and customize your personal streaming library could be a main selling point of Apple Music over Spotify to power users/super music nerds, since Spotify's UI/infrastructure is pretty terrible for people who prefer albums & collections over making everything into playlists.