Music albums not grouping correctly in iTunes on iPhone

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Music albums not grouping correctly in iTunes on iPhone

Several people have reported the problem that in recent versions of iTunes on iPhone some songs are not grouped correctly as albums, even when the tags are complete and correct.

For me, the following was the simplest workaround that I found, and as as far as I can tell it has not been mentioned yet (apologies in advance if I overlooked it):

I noticed that in the case of albums that don't sort correctly, in the "sorting" tab the "artist" field entry is grey, ie it was entered automatically, which is normally enough, and iTunes for OS X interprets it correctly.

If you add it again manually (as you would normally only do if you want it sorted differently for some reason), then the songs will be grouped correctly on iPhone as well.

Annoying to have to do that for lots of albums, but it works and perhaps it also helps to identify the cause of the problem.

iPhone SE, iOS 12

Posted on Oct 15, 2018 12:46 PM

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Answer 1

aplantage Author

Level 1

7 points

Oct 16, 2018 5:58 AM in response to turingtest2

It's not due to any "human error" (missing or inconsistent entries, duplicate songs ...). It's a bug in recent updates. which has already been discussed without any real solution, just workarounds here:

Itunes 12.7 bug: every song is its own album

I just started a new thread because that one was closed.)

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

272,707 points

Oct 16, 2018 5:53 AM in response to aplantage

If iTunes shows multiple instances of an artist or an album then what generally works is to select all related tracks and use Get Info to add say a trailing X to each of the fields that the tracks should have in common:

For an album; Album, Album Artist, and Artist (if artist is the same for all tracks) *
For an artist; Album Artist (and Artist unless there are guest/featured artists listed which should not be changed)

Apply the change which merges things together, then remove the excess characters. Occasionally it may help to close and reopen iTunes between the two renaming operations. Part of a compilation should also be set consistently.

* If tracks are to be synced to a non-iOS device there should be a common Artist and/or the album should be set as a Compilation.

Use the songs view and display the fields Album, Sort Album, Album Artist, Sort Album Artist, Artist and Sort Artist side by side so you see whether or not it is appropriate to edit Artist and if sort values could be causing any further problems. See Grouping tracks into albums for more help if required.

One further tip for really stubborn duplicates. At one point I had three lots of Various Artists in the artists view of my iTunes Match library that wouldn't respond to the usual trailing X treatment. What I found worked was to add the trailing X to start with, but then with each group that iTunes wanted to keep separate start typing a value and let iTunes autocomplete from say Var... to Various Artists. Picking from the autocomplete lists seemed to work when pasting/editing the whole value didn't.

tt2

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Answer 3

aplantage Author

Level 1

7 points

Oct 15, 2018 11:36 PM in response to aplantage

PS It also works to hit delete in order to reset the sorting fields and let iTunes enter the information automatically again. In any case, it seems to have something to do with the processing of sorting fields.

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Answer 4

aplantage Author

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Oct 16, 2018 6:11 AM in response to turingtest2

PS NB that people write that this only happens on iPhone, ie the SAME albums group fine when in iTunes on the Mac, but don't anymore when copied, and even when copied via iTunes.

As I explained, when I checked the tags of the files on the phone, there were still correct, only that the sorting fields don't seem to be interpreted correctly unless manually entered again or forcing iTunes to do it by deleting them.

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Answer 5

turingtest2

Level 10

272,707 points

Oct 16, 2018 6:20 AM in response to aplantage

iTunes can sometime display multiple covers, artists, etc. even when the metadata is already consistent. Likewise some problems may only show up when content is transferred. Editing sort values has a similar effect to the trailing X method in that it causes internal indices to be reevaluated.

tt2

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Answer 6

aplantage Author

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Oct 16, 2018 6:26 AM in response to turingtest2

The point is that iTunes SHOULDN'T do that, that it didn't do this before (eg it used to work fine on my older iPhone, with older versions of iTunes, and it still works fine on my ipod nano!) and what best to do about it until the problem is fixed.

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Answer 7

turingtest2

Level 10

272,707 points

Oct 16, 2018 6:32 AM in response to aplantage

aplantage wrote:

The point is that iTunes SHOULDN'T do that,

Quite. I've been using iTunes for 11 years, and every new version of iTunes or iOS has the potential to break something that was working perfectly well. It's a logic puzzle that keeps on giving. 👿

tt2

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Answer 8

aplantage Author

Level 1

7 points

Oct 16, 2018 6:45 AM in response to turingtest2

If you can believe it, until recently I was still quite content with an iPhone 4s, and now that I've switched to an iPhone SE that I picked up cheap, this is the first problem I encountered with iTunes. Fortunately, I don't listen to music much at all on the phone, because it drains the battery too fast, but since they stopped making iPods, I might have to get used to that too sometime ...

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Music albums not grouping correctly in iTunes on iPhone

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