Itunes 12.7 bug: every song is its own album

True. Confirming that this "workaround" from mezzuzah12 works. Apple should fix this - looks really like a bug.

See Make a split library portable and keep the entire library on your external drive. Backup to a second for security.

tt2

Same For Me

Oh Oh Apple, It's time to fix the bug !!!!

I share every single word of your frustration im soooo over being forced into using a certain really old pc i have to keep alive bec its also my main itunes computer

See Organizing audiobook chapters for some ideas for them.

tt2

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2

nice to know i'm not totally incompetent. guess i'll just use playlists until the cupertino kids get sorted.

i should know better by now. so simple i feel stupid. thanks.

Has this been fixed in iTunes 12.8?

Updated to iTunes 12.8 as I thought it would help, but no such luck 😟

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

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

Agreed.

As the behavior persists as of iTunes for Windows/Mac (12.7.5.9) with iOS 11.4, it became apparent that this is intended behavior. As there isn't much information available from Apple on the open public channels - and I'm not inclined to go down the Development SDK rabbit hole at this time - one is left with trial-and-error research, assumptions, and/or speculations.

This got me thinking that perhaps previous iterations of iTunes and iOS Music did not fully incorporate the latest ID3Tag implementation (ex: ID3v2.4).

Altering ID3Tag metadata to incorporate Sort Artist/Album/Name and Work Name/Work Number/Movement seems to produce a desired result when using iTunes as a conduit (i.e. not the iTunes Library) to copy songs to the iDevice. I suspect that copying the songs from the iTunes Library may have been broken on previous dot releases of iTunes 12.7.x and/or iOS 11.x and the latest versions seem to address this.

I typically set my ID3Tag Grouping field to match the Genre field as this allows the song to be properly handled by a variety of players such as WMP, KODI, WinAMP, FooBar, hardware vehicle players (BT, SD, Line-In, etc.); and until now, iTunes.

It certainly would have been helpful if Apple had provided additional details as to what metadata revisions (ex: ID3v2.4) they support in iTunes, iOS Music Players, etc.