Song Track Title Not Displaying On iPhone In Music App

This is really strange but the method I described in my last post seems to have worked - delete songs off phone, change all non-album songs to having “singles” as their album, add to phone, delete album title leaving the album field blank). This gave me one “unknown album” for each artist and all of the non-album songs correctly listed under that album. Exactly what I was trying to do.

Here’s what else I tired:

1) I also tried just deleting the songs from the phone and re-adding the songs without changing anything in iTunes. That didn’t work – it gave me multiple unknown albums with one song each

2) I also tried deleting from phone, then adding album artist field (keeping the album field blank) and that just led to multiple unknown albums with one song each.

3) I also tried deleting from phone, then adding album artist field AND album field, then adding back on phone. This worked (one album titled singles with all non-album songs listed). It even still worked when I deleted the album title (thus leaving the album field blank and the album artist field filled in). But then when I deleted the album artist the songs disappeared from my phone under artist view (if the artist didn’t have an album his name would disappear altogether) – but the strange thing was the songs were still listed on iTunes (on my computer) as being present on my phone. Very strange.

The only way I was able get it to work was the way I described at the top. And the good news is now my albums view is not cluttered with non-full albums and I didn’t need to repopulate the album artist field.

Fair enough. Actually I might have found something that is working.

I deleted all my non album songs from my iPhone. Then on iTunes I changed all the non-album songs to having the album "singles" and added them to my phone. This would group all the non-album songs for a particular artist under one album - titled "singles" which worked well in the artist view (just one album titled singles with 20 songs in them rather than 20 albums titled singles with one song in each of them).

Then I delete the "singles" album title. I tried this for a sample of artists and it worked on all of them (just one album titled "unknown album" with 20 songs in it). I'm doling it now for the rest of the artists and will report back.

Oh one other thing, I do not auto-sync my music with iTunes. In order to get a song from my iTunes onto my iPhone, I manually add it by dragging the files on iTunes onto the phone icon on iTunes. I have the "manually manage music and videos" box checked.

I also do not use Apple Music or iTunes Match

Thanks for the response. I'm not sure I'm following your instructions though. What do you mean when you say "get info" - is that the same as the screen that comes up when you hit "song info" after right clicking on a song in iTunes?

This screen?

Wow, I'm pretty sure this fixed the issue - thanks a million!!! I have several more of these so tonight I will go through and check that this fixes them too. I'm so excited, this has been driving me absolutely nuts.

About a year ago you were helping me with this issue on another thread - you offered lots of tips but unfortunately none that would fix this issue without a TON of manual work (something with the ID Tags), and since I had so many of these, it would have taken me forever to fix all of them. This is a much quicker and more efficient fix. I'm curious when you discovered this fix? Perhaps I wasn't explaining my issue well enough before, but you hit the nail on the head right away this time. I really really appreciate the suggestion.

On another topic, I'm wondering if you can help me with an issue I'm having on the "artist" view on the iPhone music app. Before, when you clicked into a specific artist, if you didn't have a an album for that artist (but instead just a bunch of random non-album songs) you'd see those songs individually listed in a row. Made it easy to scroll through them and click the song you wanted. Now, if there is no album it's just a bunch of "unknown albums" listed, each with one individual track. So if you have an artist, with lets say 25 non-album songs, you may have to click into 25 different "unknown albums" in order to find the song you want. Here are some screen shots of what I'm talking about. any idea on how to get it back to the old way where all the non-album songs would just be listed in a row so you can quickly browse and pick what you want?

Gotcha. So is this a "unknown album" issue a new thing? Because I never needed to put "unknown album" for each and every single non-album song in order to get them to list together (rather than each of them under their own "unknown album") - must be a change in a recent iTunes update or Music app update?