Apple Music Weird Music problem (on Mac OS Big Sur) - splitting albums

[newtito]

Couldn't find this topic being discussed anywhere, but on occasion when I am playing music in Apple Music app on my iMac, the song will randomly be placed in a new album of the same name. The album would be completely together before playing, and then just playing the song once would put it in a "new" album. Any one encountered this issue? Very frustrating, as I take meticulous care of my albums. See example:

 

[mrsmith1]

I've had that problem, but only when I'm downloading bootlegs from a website. Doesn't do it every time but often enough.

 

[newtito]

I've ripped my files from my CDs and take care to ensure that they are all tagged appropriately. This happens randomly, when I double click on a song to play it, it just separates it out to a "new" album with the same name, artist, etc.

 

[glindon]

This has been happening to me for years now. It's an issue with Apple Music and iTunes Match for me. Lots of my library is Matched and for whatever reason iTunes / Music.app are using whatever tags from Apple Music instead of what I set them too. Sometimes Music will randomly decide that since said track is on a compilation album that it will retag the track so when you look at the album suddenly one of the songs is "missing." THANKS APPLE! Some of my tracks also end up in my library twice -- a Match version and an Apple Music version. You can fix it by selecting all the album tracks and "Get Info" by right clicking. Retype in the Album Name and Artist name. It will warn you that you are changing several tracks and just click OK. Find duplicate tracks and when you "get info" you select the "File" tab and can see if it's a Match or a AM file. Delete the track that is the AM version so only the Match version remains.

 

[TonyG1]

I think the issue, certainly with Music, is to do with how the Music Library displays album metadata. I have a stand-alone iTunes Match subscription. If I start with an empty Music Library (with Cloud Library synchronisation turned off) and import my full music collection I see 976 albums and 12,707 songs. All my files are .MP3, and all have consistent Artist, Album, Album Artist, Composer and Song (including the text-case - "Proper English Case"). Any non-standard characters have been replaced to eliminate problems with transferring to ExFat storage media. All files have embedded .JPG artwork at 300x300 (because I export to a number of devices that won't display larger artwork files). Files are a mixture of downloads from Apple (converted to MP3), downloads from other providers, or ripped from CDs.

When I switch synchronisation on and the Cloud Music Library has updated I see over 1000 Albums and about 13,000 songs. There is no change to the files themselves in the Music folder. What I can see is that the Music Library is showing discrepancies in the metadata - in "Album" view characters in the Album or Album Artist name have changed case (i.e. from "Dark Side of the Moon" to "Dark Side Of The Moon"). So I think what happens is that the "matched" file metadata is being displayed in preference to the folder file metadata. In Song" view I can set the view to "Downloaded Data Only" and then I see exactly12,707 songs again - but unfortunately in Album view the split albums are still there. I'm waiting for a callback from Apple, but at the moment my quickest fix when I add more music is to let the synchronisation run its course, switch synchronisation off, delete the whole library (songs, not files) and then re-import from the Music folder. Not ideal, but at least it works...

 

[darngooddesign]

I have this every so often, just select all the tracks and change the album name by one letter.