Music app shows wrong years for songs

[mispeled]

Completely baffled by this.
Please note - these are not songs purchased from the iTunes store. These are songs ripped from my personal CDs as mp3s and tagged using the iTunes desktop application.

This is just an example. Please also note that not every song in my iTunes is on my phone.

Okay, here goes.

Here's a search for songs with the phrase "groov" in them, as shown on my computer's iTunes:

These are songs that I've painstakingly tagged with the correct year of original release. I've gone to Wikipedia or other sources and found the exact year, which is what I want; not the date of a remaster release; not the date of a mix CD they came off of; not the year I ripped the CD and made the mp3; not the year I tagged the mp3. The actual year the song came from. I've used iTunes, and a program called mp3tagtools v1.2, and another program, Mp3Tag v2.81. Using mp3 tags ID3v1.1 and ID3v2.x and iTunes to use - whatever version of ID it uses. Nowhere can I find any other place to change the year. However, if I bring up the exact same songs in my iPhone Music app:

You, like I, can plainly see the years are completely different. Groovin' by The Rascals from 2009? Huh? Take a look again at my iTunes, where I've tagged it as year 1967. Even Groove Is In The Heart, tagged 1990 in iTunes (and so on) is showing up in my iPhone Music app search list as 1999. Why? Why, iPhone music app, why?

Anybody got any ideas? Or is there something obvious I'm missing? Or is there something more I can tell you that you need to know to help?

....help? I've got an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2.1 and using Windows 10, iTunes desktop version 12.5.5.5

 

[The Equalizer]

Have you got Apple Music and Match turned on? Turn those off in Settings/Music and see.
Also switch on Only Offline Music (in the Music App)

 

[mispeled]

Apple Music turned off, yes. Only viewing music on the phone. Can't find where to turn off Match, although perhaps that's the culprit. Not finding it in settings -> music or in settings -> itunes & app store. Somewhere else, maybe?

 

[mispeled]

I'm guessing this is a completely unsolvable, applicable-only-to-me problem then.

If anyone is still listening or puzzled by this, here's more steps I took today to see if I could isolate the problem further.

First, I took one sample song from the many ones that have bizarre year files. For this example, I chose Groovin' by The Rascals. On my iTunes, and in all my tag sources, I have it as year 1967. When I search for it in the iPhone Music app, it shows the year as 2009. (See post above).

I ripped a new version of the song from my CD, removed all tags, then wrote new tags. The file on the hard drive has a different file name (Rascals - Groovin' (Temp).mp3). I've also tagged the file with the title tag "Groovin' (Temp.)" I then added the file to my iTunes library from the computer:

I then synced my iTunes library to my phone. The old version still shows year 2009; the new version shows the correct year tag, 1967:

I then deleted the original file (filename The Rascals - Groovin'.mp3) from my library and re-synced, leaving only the new Temp file.

I then closed iTunes. Re-opened iTunes. Deleted the Temp file from my library. Moved it to the same folder as the original file, and added it back to the iTunes library. Synced the phone, which put it back in the Music library, with the right year.

So far so good. I removed it my from iTunes library again, re-synced the phone to remove it from my iPhone music library. Restarted iTunes. Went to where the file is saved on my hard drive and deleted the original file. I then renamed the new file the same name as the original file (The Rascals - Groovin'.mp3). Added it to iTunes, then synced to my phone. But it doesn't retain the new year info, it goes back to saying the year is 2009:

Fortunately, I still have my old iPhone 6 Plus. So I put that in, synced it, and the exact same file with the exact same file name with the exact same settings on my iPhone 6 appears like this:

Well, how about that. That's what I'm wanting. The year I tagged in the file to show up. So why is my iPhone 7 giving the wrong year? Where is it getting the year from in the first place? And why is it retaining it even when I've retagged and put in a brand new file - a file that very clearly, on a different device, shows that I've tagged it correctly?

It's a puzzle, no? I'm hoping for a solution that is not "rip your entire library again, delete your iTunes library, reset your iPhone to factory default, and resync everything from scratch" but that always seems to be the only answer. Anyone?

 

[Shirasaki]

Are you consistently using iTunes to create and edit tags? I always use iTunes to tag my music and never see your issue.

 

[mispeled]

I like to batch tag using mp3tagtools v1.2, and another program, Mp3Tag v2.81. If I need to do a quick edit on a tag, I do it through iTunes. Though you bring up a good point - I'll try my experiment again and use solely iTunes to tag. However, it seems to me that the song has been indexed in my iPhone music library as it is, with the year 2009, so no matter what I do, as soon as the index sees the same song name in the same file location with the same tags, it just reads the info from the index and uses that instead of recreating an entry. I just can't understand where it got the year 2009 in the first place, except for maybe The Equalizer's theory that there's some iTunes Match / Apple Music thing going on where it reads the info of my file and tags it from their database instead of my personal tags.

 

[JPM42]

Would you mind showing some screenshots in how these are set up in iTunes?

In my experience, the reason the release years can be different is that I'm guessing all of these songs are coming from compilation albums where many of the songs have different years. In fact, I'd bet that if you went into Album view in iTunes and clicked on the albums these are from, the album year will be the same as what's appearing in your iPhone. Although the temp file for The Rascals song is peculiar.

I've always wished that iTunes would have, in addition to being able to set the year for the individual song, the ability to set the original release year for the album as a whole. Granted, in most cases, the year is the same, but in the instance of compilations, problems like this arise. And what happens is that iTunes doesn't know how to make sense of that, so it picks a random year from the songs on these compilations, hence the odd year.

 

[mispeled]

Here's how it's set up in iTunes:

Now here's the story behind it. My buddy lived by a used record store, and every year for my birthday, he'd get me a box set of CDs. Totally 80s box set. Beach Boys box set. Classic Soft Rock box set. One year he even got me the Hanna-Barbera Flintstones music box set. Great gifts. They take up a lot of space. Also, 18 discs of Classic Soft Rock is a bit much of classic soft rock, even for a guy who spends this much time trying to tag "Groovin'".

So instead of keeping all those discs, I ripped the songs I liked and made my own CDs out of the songs I wanted to keep. And, no, I didn't burn this CD in 2009, although that would be really awesome if that was the case.

Ripped the CDs not with iTunes but with Nero. And, no, did not rip the CDs in 2009 either. Nonetheless - rip songs off the CDs I want, create new CDs, make an 18 CD set into a three CD set. Then at a later date, rip those songs to mp3, also using Nero. Tag files, with my own album name (60s) and own artwork (pretty well done if I do say so myself). Add mp3 to iTunes. Sync to iPhone. Weird year shows up in iPhone.

Truth is, I don't actually remember which box set Groovin' came from. I'm pretty sure it's from the Time-Life Classic Soft Rock box set, although I did some box set searching and can't find one from 2009. I again think it's an Apple Music thing that's trying to be helpful by reading some sort of info on the file - like Gracenote does - and spitting back information. Still, I seem to be able to overwrite that. Behold below, my rip of my Innocent Man remaster CD. That came out in 1998, so Gracenote info and iTunes would see it as 1998, right?

iTunes tag:

I did this the exact same way and there's no weird year stuff. Here's my only guess: When I originally ripped the file, there must have been some auto-tag done. I can't say that I've always stripped tags entirely and started from scratch. I just change the fields I want to change, and leave the right ones the way they are. So there may be some leftover tags that got imported into iTunes, and then when I saw the odd years, I went in, stripped the tags, started from scratch, put them back into iTunes, but too late because the index on the iPhone still wants to hang onto the old data for convenience sake so it doesn't start from scratch. At least, that's how I'm sleeping at night.

I'm curious if anyone else has this issue, although I realize there may not be many out there with box set consolidation / CD-R hoarding / mp3 ripping / new not-accurate album name tagging. And if there aren't many out there, why not?

 

[mispeled]

...or.

My other guess is that iTunes uses a Gracenote-like tagging process, and picking a song based on what it thinks it is rather than what it is. I very often will put a CD in to rip in a program and the program will access Gracenote, then return either a completely wrong track listing or several different choices of track listings for the same CD. These are generally all user generated, and we're stuck to the whim of whoever wrote the tags in the first place. Perhaps iTunes is using a similar, if not the same, database to identify songs and tagging them automatically without my getting the option to choose if it's correct or not?

 

[Shirasaki]

I rip my purchased CDs using EAC (available under windows only), and then import them into iTunes using XLD. Also I only keep lossless format rather than MP3. My songs are almost only Japanese songs, while most of them are just not available in iTunes Store anyway. I never see such weird years issue.

Idk if these could be the root cause of your issue but I doubt it. You could find out your original rip and just import those lossless files into your phone. Then see the result.