Song name shows as Grouping name on iPhone

The problem is caused by the fact that Apple has added a new tag to iTunes tracks called "Work Name".

Work name is meant to be used for classical music to show the name of the work (as opposed to the movement).

However, Apple decided to automatically populate "work name" with the values in "grouping". So, in the Music app, it is showing you what it thinks is the name of the work being listened to, but due to a screw-up, it is showing your the grouping value instead.

To see this:

1. "Get Info" for an individual track

2. The first field is "song", but there are two arrows next to it. If you click on "song", you can change it to "work name"

To fix this:

1. Select all the affected tracks

2. "Get Info"

3. Check the box called "Use work and movement"

4. Delete the work value.

To see all the affected tracks, make a new smart playlist where "Work" is not [empty]. 8724 tracks. Thanks, Apple!

Yep. When the tracks are playing, they display correctly for me, too. But shows grouping name for song title in the album track list view on iPhone. What's also strange is that it does not do this for all songs that I have in groups, just some.

If you go into the Song list in iTunes and select all of the items at once, select Song Info and yes to editing multiple items. A tick box will appear at the top of the panel stating Use Work and Movement, select this and clear the word Mixed from the Work field.

This will then clear the field and should resolve this issue. 😀

Quick side note, I found that I was still seeing the wrong name after a couple of syncs, so I removed all music from the iPhone and then re-added it. Everything has now gone over OK and the correct titles are displayed.

hi mr Andrew

thanks for your assistance ... I dont know what happened to my earlier posts ... any ways .. this problem I face with only AIFF files which I have ripped with dBpower ... I tried to rip some of my CDs with XLD .. and all are perfect .. with song name in the correct field. in the case of ALAC .. there is no problem at all, whether ripped with dBpower of XLD.

any ways .. many thanks ...

Hi, I have a problem which sound similar to this. Since upgrading to iOS 11 my music app shows incorrect song titles for newly uploaded albums. Sounds,like the group / work name issue as all the correct data is present in iTunes. any hope of a fix soon as I do not want to do this correction for every album I upload.

Thanks, Paul

this issue driving me crazy! I've tried many times to clear the work field. It just comes back like the file is read-only or something. I added record labels in the grouping field to many (8000) of my vinyl ripped tracks to sort easier/make playlists etc. Now it's come back to bite me. Thanks apple!

Any idea how to permanently remove grouping/work fields? My file is 11 years old and has tons of history I don't want to lose (play counts/date added etc)

On top of it my iPhone resyncs most songs every time I plug it in. No changes were made to files/tags/playlists etc

Forgot to add when I try to delete the work field, all of the titles change to the work field name. So I have to uncheck the box to get the titles to show correctly.

Always Mac (moved to new hardware many times) mp3/aac/aiff

If I check the box to convert before syncing - works as expected - no resyncs. I just got a 256GB X I don't want to compress anymore.

any way to edit the file directly and do a find/replace?

You cannot edit tags for files that are actually read only or for which your user account doesn't have write permissions. A quick Google suggests Tag Stripper might work for the pesky AIFF files, although that seems like overkill as you'd have to put back the other data by hand. Converting to Apple Lossless (which is a lossless conversion for AIFF) might be a better option.

tt2

Many thanks! I was deep into trying to edit ID3 tags with an external editor when I, after many attempts, managed to assemble a Google search that produced your solution. So easy, and yet so unthinkable, which once again proves that Apple's idea of user-friendliness – designing things the way they think you want it, and not giving you the options – is not always the best choice.

Strange thing is that the ID3 tag editor didn't show these new "work and movement" tags.

I guess with AIFF a workaround is a lossless conversion to Apple Lossless where it should be possible to remove the Work field, then a conversion back to AIFF if you need tracks in that format for some purpose outside iTunes, otherwise stick with the more compact format.

tt2

Just updated iOS due to the spectre issue and now I have this issue as well, what on earth are they thinking? do they not beta test this rubbish, why is it random? Every single track in my library has a grouping tag, like another poster I too enter country/state in that field (as you used to be able to create smart playlists from it, so if I wanted to have a playlist of Texan artists I could create it from 'America (TX)' which would be the grouping tag I would have entered), but the issue only occurs on 15 - 20% of albums, am I gathering that the 'fix' here is to actually delete the tags that you have spent 10 years entering? That is not a 'fix' really as who knows what the next update will bring (starting to worry about sort album field (release date) and sort artist album (surname, forename)!), I mean it is cool that they eventually tried to make tagging classical music better but it's just created a problem for every other genre of music, please fix this for the next update!!!

hi .. as per my experience ..

I too had the same issue on all my music .. I have got most of my music ripped either by XLD / dBpower & EAC ( yes, they are windows based rippers ) the "grouping" field comes up in iTunes 12.7 for all the AIFF formats ripped by dBpower & EAC. it doesn't happen in XLD ...

further, it doesn't come up in any of the compressed formats i.e. ALAC / mp3.

so as I generally listen to all music in AIFF.

there is a way around to "batch convert" ( thanks Mr. Spoon of dBpower ) to take out the "style" tag & then you are done. you have the AIFF with out the "grouping" showing up...

AndrewSwift definitely got to the heart of the matter. I just wanted to share the steps I followed to eliminate ALL song title and "work" problems, and include a couple of little idiosyncrasies....

1) Instead of making a playlist, I went to my library in the "Songs" view, then right clicked the on the column header bar and checked "Work" from the drop-down menu/list. Then, I clicked the "Work" column header to organize the library by work. Now, everything with a work field value was listed together.

2) So, I selected that whole group, and followed steps 2 – 4 in AndrewSwift's instructions --> "OK" => iTunes updated library. All tracks/songs for which the "work" value could be deleted were automatically reorganized to their respective locations.

**Note: the songs stay highlighted during & after editing, as long as you do NOT click on something else. So, I made sure to right-click on one of the highlighted songs and UNCHECK "Use work and movement" before deselecting the list.

3) Those remaining with "work" values were all *.aiff (file format). As has been mentioned [I think], iTunes does not change the "work" field for *.aiff.

4) So, I just selected all the *.aiff songs --> File > Convert > Create Apple Lossless Version.

...took a shower and let it run (I had a LOT of *.aiff songs). When I came back, I deleted all the highlighted *.aiff from my library.

5) Then, I used AndrewSwift's instructions to delete all the work values from my new Apple Lossless (*.alac) tracks.

6) Sync'd iPhone, and Music library was repopulated by *.alac WITHOUT those stupid "work" values replacing the song titles. PLUS, it freed up some more space on my phone.

...pretty darned easy 🙂

Edit to add: in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I didn't actually delete all my *.aiff. I told iTunes to send them to the Trash, then copied them from the trash to a folder that ended up on an external drive.

@AndrewSwift

I wanted to just say thank you, for the fantastic explanation of the problem and your thorough, easy to understand solution to it. I wish more people explained rather odd IT issues just as you did.