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Unknown Albums shown after sync to iPhone

My iTunes library on both my Mac and my iPad appears complete and correctly identified. The same library on my iPhone, however, doesn't correctly capture the Album information after syncing, instead each song is listed as an Unknown Album from this artist, despite the information being correctly identified by my Mac. Most all of my music has been ripped from CD's that I've bought over the years, so this may be a problem that is specific to music bought outside of the iTunes store. I believe that all my music is correctly tagged music has been tagged as it appears as it should on the Macbook iTunes. I've checked every field and nothing seems amiss on the song info for the tracks for any given album.


I read an earlier post at this site for a "fix" to this that kind of works - When you sync an album onto the phone and you notice that each track shows as a separate Unknown Album, you can delete the tracks from the phone's playlist and then sync it again a second time. Only then will the album will show up on the phone correctly as one, correctly-titled album. That earlier post indicated "this only seems to work when you're adding one album at a time. If you're adding several all at once, this tactic is less effective."


My iPhone 6 is running iOSX 11.2.5, the Mac OS is 10.13.3 and the iTunes version is 12.7.3.46. I'm hoping that someone might be able to identify what I need to alter so that music syncs correctly on the initial attempt.

Mac mini, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3)

Posted on Feb 23, 2018 9:23 AM

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3 replies

Feb 27, 2018 9:43 AM in response to turingtest2

Your suggestion refers to Windows and my issue seems to be somewhere in the Mac/iOSX realm. I found my most recent iTunes Library.itl file but couldn't see any of the property information that seems to show on the article with Windows troubleshooting you supplied. The closest thing I could find to Properties was Get Info, which showed that I had both Read and Write privilege. If you think a screen shot of that iTunes Library.itl info would be of any help, I'd try to copy and paste one. Any help in resolving this issue is appreciated.

Feb 27, 2018 9:53 AM in response to mainline9

I was trying to direct you to the multiple tags section. In this context you can ignore the first sentence.


Multiple tags (MP3 files only)

If you have applied the permissions fix and tracks still won't accept your updates then a remaining possibility for MP3 files is that they have multiple tags. The ID3 specification allows files to have multiple tags in different versions and languages, but iTunes only works properly with single tags. When multiple tags are present it can sometimes fail to apply updates to the tag that it later reads back (presumably updating one of the others in the file) and it is also possible that iPod & iTunes may have different rules for which tag they give priority to. This could lead to situations in which everything is properly organised in iTunes but then inexplicably falls apart on an iPod or iOS device, or tracks that display different information in Windows Explorer or another media player. There are 3rd party tag editors that can manipulate multiple tags but I don't have a recommendation offhand. A workaround in iTunes is to use File > Convert > Convert ID3 Tags... > None a few times to remove all existing tags and then File > Convert > Convert ID3 Tags... > v2.3 to build a fresh tag with the information still held in the iTunes database. I've read in the past that iTunes isn't fully compliant with the v2.4 spec. although this may no longer be the case, however support for v2.3 is widespread so I would suggest using v2.3 over v2.4. Any embedded artwork will be removed so this needs to be replaced if wanted. For Windows users running a script called CreateFolderArt before and after the tag cleaning process should manage this.


tt2

Unknown Albums shown after sync to iPhone

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