nicholasg

What's annoying is in the Music app on my Mac everything is fine. I can go to Artists, click on Compilations and each album is a single album. The problem is on iOS where there seems to be no way to play an compilation album if some of the Artists are also Album Artists on others albums.

1) I have a number of compilation albums. I think the they are tagged correctly i.e. Artist = name of performer of track; Album Artist is blank and Compilation check-box is clicked 2) Sync a compilation album to iPhone. 3) Looking at the Library -> Compilations on iPhone, some of the single albums in MacOS Music app are broken into multiple albums in iOS Music app What seems to happen is if there are other albums in your library where the Album Artist = the Artist of one or more tracks on the Compilation album then these tracks are put on their own album. You can see this with the "Help" album below. It is one album in the Mac Music but 9 on my iPhone seemingly because I have albums from "Manic Street Preachers", "Massive Attack", "The Stone Roses", "Suede", "O'Connor, Sinead", "Radiohead", "The Charlatans" and "Blur" but not from the other artists on the album. Is this some sort of "feature"?

I did the following: - 1) Stop syncing music with iPhone so all music files were removed. 2) Updated to iOS 17.1.2 3) Rebooted iMac and iPhone 4) Changed setting in Finder to sync all music All albums are now correct on iPhone.

The music is synced from Mac to iPhone via USB-C cable. This is happening to thousands of albums and it is always first track is one album, all the other tracks are another album.

When I rip CDs I tend to tag the files so the work (symphony, opera etc.) is an album, ignoring the sequence on the CDs. This seems to have happened to maybe half of my around 4000 albums, but only on my iPhone, everything looks good on my Mac. I'm thinking of waiting until iOS 7.2 comes out and reloading the library.

Have a new iPhone 15 and just synced up my Music library from my Mac. A lot of the albums have been split into 2 albums. It seems random, but it is always one album with track 1 and another album with track 2 - n. I checked the tracks on the Mac and all the meta data is identical for all 5 tracks (except for the Title) and obviously it is 1 album. Any ideas? Thanks, Nicholas

I agree with some of the points above regarding AFHC and Yate. I found the developer extremely responsive. I asked him about some errors, he determined that he had introduced a bug in AFHC and there were not errors in the files, and within hours had pushed an update (on a Saturday). Most of the errors I got where related to corrupted files. I researched the app forum and found someone with the same errors. They turned out to be harmless, but I decided to rip a few CDs again to get rid of them. Other errors were in downloads were there were 2 ARTIST tags per track. I used Yate to update the files. I have found over the years iTunes (and I assume Music) and Squeezebox Server had exhibit strange behavior with tags are messed up. iTunes can have a problem with sorting albums if there are multiple ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags. This is not supposed to happen, but some download vendors are not good as sticking to the specification. I think it a good investment of time to check all files before you load them into iTunes (or Music) with something like AFHC/Yate.

Thanks for the feedback. Yate looks very promising. The developer also has a great little app "Audio File Health Check" for free. https://2manyrobots.com/plaster/ I ran it against my Music library and found a lot of errors. I'm sure most are not important, but I've found iTunes does weird things based on tags but does not allow you to see or fix. E.g. if you have multiple ARTIST tags. This app help you find stuff like that. He also has a useful blog. I noticed some albums missing artwork and assumed I forgot to add it. Turns out there is a bug in the Music app. https://2manyrobots.com/my-experiences-with-the-music-application-so-far/ I've also seen the other bug he mentions (Albums splitting into multiple albums with tracks split between them).

I like to do QC on downloads before adding them to my Music library. I've found some downloads have multiple tags of the same type on a track e.g. 2 different ARTIST tags. You can only see one ARTIST in iTunes (and I assume Music) but I've found it can cause iTunes to have issues with sorting. You also can't fix the problem in iTunes (because you only see one of the tags). So I used to check the tags with mp3tag (mp3tag.de). It runs under WINE, but not on Catalina. The developer is working on a native Mac version, but I found an alternative native MacOS app and wondered if anyone here uses it. Its called Meta https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ and its only $17.99 on the App Store (with a 4.3) rating. Here's a review https://www.macstories.net/mac/editing-flac-metadata-with-meta-for-mac/

The files were added to the Music app. You can see from the screen shot they have a bunch of tags and album art work that was added in the Music app. Those tags and the art work where not in the ripped files. Agreed about the amount of time available 😉

This is what I ended up doing: - 1) Exported my library.xml (File -> Library -> Export library) 2) Opened in TextEdit 3) Looked for the missing files. Could not find them 4) Added files back to Music app They are now in the Music app. Still not sure how they got removed for the app.

I can tell they were added because when I look at them in Finder I can see the tags and artwork I added in the Music App. They just seem to have disappeared from the Music app at some point.

I'm on macOS 10.15.4. I have a fairly large library c. 34k songs. I noticed something pretty strange. When I look in the file system I can see a folder in ../Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/ and within the folder 3 songs which I loaded into the Music app last week, but I can not find it when using the Music GUI. I could copy the files, delete them and then reload then via the "Automatically Add to Music" folder, but I'm worried that this may cause some sort of corruption in the Music database. Anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks, Nicholas

I wonder why a PDF of the album book is not available with either of the digital downloads (unlike Sgt. Pepper's)? BUT the only way (as far as I can tell) to get the Esher demos as 96/24 is via digital download, I don't think they are on the Blu-Ray. Correct?

I wonder why a PDF of the album artwork is not available with either of the digital downloads (unlike Sgt. Pepper's)?