Apple Music separating albums

If iTunes or Music show multiple instances of an artist or an album then what generally works is to select all related tracks and use Song 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 the app 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 it autocomplete from say Var... to Various Artists. Picking from the autocomplete lists seemed to work when pasting/editing the whole value didn't.

tt2

Something of note here, and mentioned by @turingtest2, is that after making a change to the album info it is likely that you'll need to refresh the display page such as by closing and reopening the app.

I've found that Music doesn't always respond live to changes made to album sorting. I often find that simply clicking the back arrow and selecting the album page again will prompt a new and corrected view after making a change like this. For me it's a bug that goes way back to Catalina.

Edit: sort these by artist, and that ought to fix this. Does it not?

“Apple Music separating albums: Can someone here help, this is driving me nuts, import music and while some are fine, quite a few albums seem to be separated as attached, I’ve tried deleting and re importing, tried amending the tags etc but no joy, is there an alternative to this dreadful software for mac, library is quite large, I’ve checked keep album and artists organised but still nothing works”

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Sort these:

They are sorted by album, not by artist. If it were by artistic, then you’d see the artist’s portrait, and would expand it to see each album, one at a time. So, sort these by artifact, and that out to fix this. Does it not?

zurzoirmur204 wrote:

...the only issues I have now is when looking at the library some items have a message that says ' unable to upload' I've checked that the songs are not obscure tracks that are not on Apple Music and tried numerous times to update the library

Use the Songs view and enable the iCloud Status column. For songs are not purchased, matched, or uploaded, what does the status read? In some cases you may be able to select such items, right-click and Add to Library to get them to add. Duplicates are intended to be excluded, as are any purchases that come from a different Apple ID. It may be possible to make new converted copies of certain problem tracks where the new copies are accepted by the Cloud Music Library.

tt2