Itunes 12.7 bug: every song is its own album

I prefer automatic syncing to manual management. Organization within the music app ought to be the same whichever method has been used to load the content. Try as I might I only see one copy of each album cover in the albums view, and one copy of each artist in the artists view. In the songs view I'm currently sorting by artist, which is actually album by artist, so I see one cover against each song from the same album in turn as I expect.

Still not sure what it is that you see. 😕

tt2

I have found that if you delete the songs from the phone and add them back again, they will now be grouped as one album. It is very perplexing why it wouldn’t do it the first time.

If I downgrade, would my current music library still be compatible with the older version?

Here's an animated GIF showing the various ID3Tag details from one of my compilation tracks:

I typically use iTunes as a conduit to copy tracks to my iOS Devices. Now I'm having to either copy the tracks via the iTunes Library, or copy/delete/copy if I want to continue what I was doing before, or use a tool like iMazing.

See Open a different iTunes Library file or create a new one - Apple Support.

I have a master library with everything in it, a smaller one that I use with iTunes Match, and several others I use when testing things. Only the master is slowed by its size.

tt2

If space is a premium you don't have to keep the library on your laptop's hard drive. You could even offload the iOS device backups if you're doing those locally rather than to iCloud. See Make a split library portable for details.

Apple don't monitor these forums for bug reports. Use Feedback - iTunes - Apple.

tt2

Some new information about this behavior ...

It appears that new functionality was added that has introduced undesired/unexpected behavior. The issue is two-fold; the first issue is that songs are now sorted using additional ID3Tags - namely:

~ TSOA Album sort order (Sort Album)

~ TSOP Performer sort order (Sort Artist)

~ TSOT Title sort order (Sort Name)

One can see this information by select "Get Info" on a song a clicking the "Sorting" button/tab. When copying or drag-n-dropping the songs from the iTunes Library to the iDevice (ex: iPhone), information is correctly added to the Music database on the iDevice.

When drag-n-dropping the songs from an external sources such as a network or HDD (i.e. not the iTunes Library) to the iDevice, the Sorting IDTag information is not populated which results in each song being its own separate album.

Some additional information touching on the subject can be found here:

Sort fields are not stored in ID3-Tag (v2.3)

The second issue is that iTunes introduced enhanced management for Classical music. When using iTunes to copy or drag-n-drop songs to the iDevice (ex: iPhone), the "WORK NAME" tag is populated with the "GENRE" information instead of the "SONG TITLE". This results in genre appearing as the song names on the iDevice.

On can confirm this by selecting connecting the iDevice via iTunes and selecting "Song Info > Details" on a song on the iDevice and switching from "SONG" to "WORK NAME". Afterwards, changing the "WORK NAME" field to the name of the song will result in the song name being displayed.

Some additional information touching on the subject can be found here:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3121662/software-entertainment/how-to-better-or ganize-classical-music-in-itunes.html

You can create a library on the external drive and/or set the options under iTunes > Preferences > Advanced for Keep... and Copy... so that it doesn't make copies of files you add or move them around. iTunes doesn't read any structure imposed by folder layout, an album is a collection of tracks with a common album title and artist or album artist. iTunes won't read your Flac files. See iTunes for Mac installers for advice on installing an older build.

tt2

I have the same issue on iTunes 12.7, however if I remove tags 'Album Artist' and 'Album name' from the songs with Meta audio tag editor program, and re-enter them, the albums seem to grouped together. However for this I should re-tag all my existing files.

This is obviously an iTunes bug again...

Good thing Apple goes out its way to prevent us using any other technique to get our MP3s onto the world's flagship music player.

Whenever I'm forced to use iTunes I think of Steve Jobs and what he cared most about.

Typically you want Album and Album Artist filled in with common values for all tracks on an album. Some views/sort orders in iTunes aren't album friendly. Without seeing some details it is hard to know what it happening. Occasionally iTunes will show multiple covers when it should not. Often adding and then removing say a trailing X from the fields that the tracks have in common will usually fix that.

tt2

I was addressing the particular post. Normally you want album artist completed to keep tracks by different artists on the same album linked together. That said I'm not seeing what you're seeing with regard to music synced to my devices, or I don;t understand you description of the issue. Each album appears to list correctly for me. Perhaps a screenshot of what you see that you think is wrong would make it clear?

tt2

I am having the same issue and it is very annoying. I thought it will be fixed by the new iTunes update but no. I manually manage the songs in my iPhone and everytime I drag the album folder into my phone, they show up as individual tiles of songs instead of being grouped as one album. Please let me know if you have found a solution to the problem. Thank You.

I'm having this same exact issue, ever since upgrading itunes which it required me to when I upgraded to X. I'm trying to put all the music manually I had before on it and 9 times out of 10 album is split songs as individual albums ....tried every workaround I could find and will not work, tried reinstalling itunes and same issue.