If you follow my writings, you know that I don’t use Apple Music for my main music library, but do use it on a test library on my MacBook, as well as on an iPod touch. I recently added it to my iPad as well, to be able to use it more around the house.
I don’t trust my main library to Apple Music because of the many problems that iCloud Music Library causes.
As I’ve been adding music to my library, I’m realizing just how bad Apple Music’s metadata is. Here’s an example.
I wanted to listen to some Frank Sinatra. There’s a big set called Ultimate Sinatra, with more than 6 hours of his music. So I added it to my library.
When I started listening to it, I noticed that I wasn’t hearing all the songs that I knew. I looked at this album in iTunes, and I was surprised to see how it displays.
This is a single album, yet iTunes shows it as a number of different albums with different titles. I’ve sorted by album so each title should be grouped, but you can see there are four different titles for tracks in the first grouping. And that first group of tracks, which is hanging together as an album, has track numbers in a seemingly random order.
Frank Sinatra is listed as the artist for all these tracks, sometimes with others. But if I view this album in a playlist by Artist, the only artist listed is Cole Porter.
And if I view the music by album? I see this:
An Hour with Harry James is the title of two “albums,” and one – whose tracks show as being in the cloud, but which are unavailable (see the first screenshot above), is called Ultimate Sinatra.
And if I view Frank Sinatra in the column browser? There seem to be a lot of albums, many of which don’t display in other views.
And the way the album is listed by genre is interesting. There is no reason why certain songs are in any of these genres. If you navigate your iTunes library by genre, you’ll have a lot of trouble. These are the genres for the various songs in this album:
Here’s what I think is happening. I’ve seen that iCloud Music Library changes tags and artwork. Rather than assuming that your tags, the ones you may have manually changed, are canonical, it just decides what the tags should be on your music. For example, yesterday, I deleted composer names in all the music in the Rock genre in my library. I don’t care about composers for that kind of music; those tags just get in the way when I browse using the column browser. But, today, all the composers are back for those songs.
So as iTunes updates your library, comparing it to music in the cloud, it re-matches files and changes tags. When I first added the Ultimate Sinatra album to my library, it was a single album, but it changed after a while. I surmise that iTunes matched the tracks and found that many of them were on different albums. Just as iTunes often matches tracks from studio albums to “best of” albums, here, it’s matched some tracks to the album I downloaded, and other tracks to whatever iTunes found first. But, of course, iTunes shouldn’t match Apple Music tracks; it only matches your music, that you’ve ripped or downloaded, and added to your iTunes library.
This is terribly wrong, of course. Not only should iTunes not change metadata that I’ve edited, but tracks added from Apple Music, or downloaded from the iTunes Store, should have a unique track ID that can be used to prevent this.
It’s very possible that deleting this album and re-adding it to my iTunes library will resolve these issues. I’m going to wait a few days and see if anything changes, then try that. But I shouldn’t have to. This is music from Apple Music, not music that I’ve ripped and matched.
This is yet another example of how messed up Apple Music is. It’s fine if you want to stream Taylor Swift, or listen to Beats 1 Radio, but once you start building a library, it’s simply a mess.
The only thing I can conclude is that Apple is not using the same database for Apple Music as they are for matching songs with iCloud Music Library. After adding this album to my library, which used Apple Music metadata, iTunes check with iCloud Music Library to match the tracks, and changed metadata.
Feel free to post your examples of messed-up metadata in the comments.
Update: Three days after I posted this article, I looked at the music in this Frank Sinatra album again. iTunes has changed some of the tags and album artwork again. Here’s a new screenshot of the three albums I showed earlier in the article:
Update 2: A few days after the first update, I deleted the album, and then re-added it from Apple Music. I wanted to see if the tracks would remain as they displayed in Apple Music, if, perhaps, my initial experience was a fluke.
The day after I re-added the album, I went to look at it. Here’s what I see:
It’s interesting that the entire album now matches to a different album, but one that showed up earlier, with different artwork. The only artist listed this time, when I view it in Artists view, is Frank Sinatra, however, and all the tracks are grouped within this single album.
When I view in in Songs view, with the column browser visible, it shows 1 different albums, whereas previously it showed eight. Four artists are listed, plus an entry for Compilations, which contains just one song by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra, and the music spans eight genres.
QED.
apple isn’t interested in you anymore? They changed their businesscase and are looking after streaming customers; not buyers. They don’t tell you, because they are Apple.
Well, yes and no. They want you to stream music that you add to your library from Apple Music. If the metadata gets messed up, you can’t find what you’re looking for, and you get frustrated.
This is exactly the reason I have not and never will be a customer of Apple Music nor will I turn on iCloud Music. I’ve spent years of effort to tweak my music library to it’s current condition and do not want wither of these entities to willy-nilly change the meta-data. It’s like Apple telling me “We know how to structure your music library better than you.” Whoever is adding the meta-data has no idea or concept of music or how consumers listen or want to listen to music. Half the time, when I download music from the iTunes store, the data is so wrong, the order of music on an album is out of order. Thanks for posting this.
Another thing that annoys me is when you add a compilation to your library, only to find later that some of the tracks are actually on other albums, so you get a bunch of single-track albums yo never asked for. The same thing happens in Rhapsody.
Have to agree with the sentiment here and Kirks post.
I would like to also add that the metadata in iTunes store is also poor, and has been since it was launched.
This, along with numerous “high level” (un)support(ive) chats, convinces me that Apple are explicitly not to be trusted when it comes to music metadata matters.
And this has a knock on effect when dealing in other areas with Apple too.
The rot is there…
Part of the problem is that the metadata is provided by record labels. I don’t know how much Apple validates it. If I simply look at the list of genres in my Apple Music library, I see genres such as Instrumental (for music by John Cage, Wim Martens, and others), Modern Era (Feldman, Brian Eno, Berio), Percussion (two works by Cage), Violin (one work by Cage), and two of the Sinatra tracks are “Smooth jazz.”
I think that, at a minimum, Apple should confirm genres, artists, composers, and album tittles. And apparently they don’t do this.
Genres are quite a specific problem and not as universally important as other metadata. Users tend to mess with the genre hugely. We could discuss (argue) til the cows come home whether Stevie Wonder is R&B, Soul, Jazz, Pop, etc, etc, etc.. It becomes more problematic when a track is on a soundtrack, so Stevie Wonder on a soundtrack, becomes Soundtrack genre. Unlike other music listers, iTunes doesn’t accept multiple genres. And good. (Personally I strip Genres down so I don’t get a 1000 genres, more like 30-50 tops… much easier).
Composers/Artists/Album Titles, yes, extremely important, not up for negotiation, this is set in stone and not open to personal opinion like genre…
It’s not a personal choice in the iTunes Store. When you browse the store, there are a certain number of genres. This shows a list of all the top-level genres:
http://www.kirkville.com/how-to-access-more-music-genres-in-the-itunes-store/
There are also sub-genres for some of these. As far as I understand, submissions to the iTunes Store must include one of the genres in that list. In iTunes Producer, the app labels use to submit tracks, there is a list of genres and subgenres. I’ll paste it at the end of this comment; it’s quite long, but you can see that it does not include Violin or Modern Era. (My guess is that these genres come from tracks added to the iTunes Store before they developed a proper genre list.)
I agree it is less important to some people, but not having composers for classical music, or mis-labeling album titles, those are much more serious.
Alternative
Alternative / Chinese Alt
Alternative / College Rock
Alternative / Goth Rock
Alternative / Grunge
Alternative / Indie Rock
Alternative / Korean Indie
Alternative / New Wave
Alternative / Punk
Anime
Blues
Blues / Acoustic Blues
Blues / Chicago Blues
Blues / Classic Blues
Blues / Contemporary Blues
Blues / Country Blues
Blues / Delta Blues
Blues / Electric Blues
Brazilian
Brazilian / Axé
Brazilian / Baile Funk
Brazilian / Bossa Nova
Brazilian / Choro
Brazilian / Forró
Brazilian / Frevo
Brazilian / MPB
Brazilian / Pagode
Brazilian / Samba
Brazilian / Sertanejo
Children’s Music
Children’s Music / Lullabies
Children’s Music / Sing-Along
Children’s Music / Stories
Chinese
Chinese / Chinese Classical
Chinese / Chinese Flute
Chinese / Chinese Opera
Chinese / Chinese Orchestral
Chinese / Chinese Regional Folk
Chinese / Chinese Strings
Chinese / Taiwanese Folk
Chinese / Tibetan Native Music
Christian & Gospel
Christian & Gospel / CCM
Christian & Gospel / Christian Metal
Christian & Gospel / Christian Pop
Christian & Gospel / Christian Rap
Christian & Gospel / Christian Rock
Christian & Gospel / Classic Christian
Christian & Gospel / Contemporary Gospel
Christian & Gospel / Gospel
Christian & Gospel / Praise & Worship
Christian & Gospel / Southern Gospel
Christian & Gospel / Traditional Gospel
Classical
Classical / Avant-Garde
Classical / Baroque
Classical / Chamber Music
Classical / Chant
Classical / Choral
Classical / Classical Crossover
Classical / Early Music
Classical / High Classical
Classical / Impressionist
Classical / Medieval
Classical / Minimalism
Classical / Modern Composition
Classical / Orchestral
Classical / Renaissance
Classical / Romantic
Classical / Wedding Music
Comedy
Comedy / Novelty
Comedy / Standup Comedy
Country
Country / Alternative Country
Country / Americana
Country / Bluegrass
Country / Contemporary Bluegrass
Country / Contemporary Country
Country / Country Gospel
Country / Honky Tonk
Country / Outlaw Country
Country / Traditional Bluegrass
Country / Traditional Country
Country / Urban Cowboy
Dance
Dance / Breakbeat
Dance / Exercise
Dance / Garage
Dance / Hardcore
Dance / House
Dance / Jungle/Drum’n’bass
Dance / Techno
Dance / Trance
Disney
Easy Listening
Easy Listening / Bop
Easy Listening / Lounge
Easy Listening / Swing
Electronic
Electronic / Ambient
Electronic / Downtempo
Electronic / Electronica
Electronic / IDM/Experimental
Electronic / Industrial
Enka
Fitness & Workout
French Pop
German Folk
German Pop
Hip Hop/Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / Alternative Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / Chinese Hip-Hop
Hip Hop/Rap / Dirty South
Hip Hop/Rap / East Coast Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / Gangsta Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / Hardcore Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / Hip-Hop
Hip Hop/Rap / Korean Hip-Hop
Hip Hop/Rap / Latin Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / Old School Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / Underground Rap
Hip Hop/Rap / West Coast Rap
Holiday
Holiday / Chanukah
Holiday / Christmas
Holiday / Christmas: Children’s
Holiday / Christmas: Classic
Holiday / Christmas: Classical
Holiday / Christmas: Jazz
Holiday / Christmas: Modern
Holiday / Christmas: Pop
Holiday / Christmas: R&B
Holiday / Christmas: Religious
Holiday / Christmas: Rock
Holiday / Easter
Holiday / Halloween
Holiday / Holiday: Other
Holiday / Thanksgiving
Indian
Indian / Bollywood
Indian / Devotional & Spiritual
Indian / Indian Classical
Indian / Indian Pop
Indian / Regional Indian
Indian / Sufi and Ghazals
Indian / Tamil
Indian / Telugu
Instrumental
J-Pop
Jazz
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz
Jazz / Big Band
Jazz / Contemporary Jazz
Jazz / Cool
Jazz / Crossover Jazz
Jazz / Dixieland
Jazz / Fusion
Jazz / Hard Bop
Jazz / Latin Jazz
Jazz / Mainstream Jazz
Jazz / Ragtime
Jazz / Smooth Jazz
Jazz / Trad Jazz
K-Pop
Karaoke
Kayokyoku
Korean
Korean / Korean Classical
Korean / Korean Trad Instrumental
Korean / Korean Trad Song
Korean / Korean Trad Theater
Latin
Latin / Alternativo & Rock Latino
Latin / Baladas y Boleros
Latin / Contemporary Latin
Latin / Latin Jazz
Latin / Pop Latino
Latin / Raices
Latin / Reggaeton y Hip-Hop
Latin / Regional Mexicano
Latin / Salsa y Tropical
New Age
New Age / Environmental
New Age / Healing
New Age / Meditation
New Age / Nature
New Age / Relaxation
New Age / Travel
Opera
Pop
Pop / Adult Contemporary
Pop / Britpop
Pop / C-Pop
Pop / Cantopop/HK-Pop
Pop / Indo Pop
Pop / Korean Folk-Pop
Pop / Malaysian Pop
Pop / Mandopop
Pop / Manilla Sound
Pop / Original Pilipino Music
Pop / Pinoy Pop
Pop / Pop/Rock
Pop / Soft Rock
Pop / Tai-Pop
Pop / Teen Pop
Pop / Thai Pop
R&B/Soul
R&B/Soul / Contemporary R&B
R&B/Soul / Disco
R&B/Soul / Doo Wop
R&B/Soul / Funk
R&B/Soul / Motown
R&B/Soul / Neo-Soul
R&B/Soul / Quiet Storm
R&B/Soul / Soul
Reggae
Reggae / Dancehall
Reggae / Dub
Reggae / Roots Reggae
Reggae / Ska
Rock
Rock / Adult Alternative
Rock / American Trad Rock
Rock / Arena Rock
Rock / Blues-Rock
Rock / British Invasion
Rock / Chinese Rock
Rock / Death Metal/Black Metal
Rock / Glam Rock
Rock / Hair Metal
Rock / Hard Rock
Rock / Heavy Metal
Rock / Jam Bands
Rock / Korean Rock
Rock / Prog-Rock/Art Rock
Rock / Psychedelic
Rock / Rock & Roll
Rock / Rockabilly
Rock / Roots Rock
Rock / Singer/Songwriter
Rock / Southern Rock
Rock / Surf
Rock / Tex-Mex
Singer/Songwriter
Singer/Songwriter / Alternative Folk
Singer/Songwriter / Contemporary Folk
Singer/Songwriter / Contemporary Singer/Songwriter
Singer/Songwriter / Folk-Rock
Singer/Songwriter / New Acoustic
Singer/Songwriter / Traditional Folk
Soundtrack
Soundtrack / Foreign Cinema
Soundtrack / Musicals
Soundtrack / Original Score
Soundtrack / Soundtrack
Soundtrack / TV Soundtrack
Spoken Word
Vocal
Vocal / Standards
Vocal / Traditional Pop
Vocal / Trot
Vocal / Vocal Jazz
Vocal / Vocal Pop
World
World / Africa
World / Afro-Beat
World / Afro-Pop
World / Asia
World / Australia
World / Cajun
World / Caribbean
World / Celtic
World / Celtic Folk
World / Contemporary Celtic
World / Dangdut
World / Dini
World / Drinking Songs
World / Europe
World / France
World / Halk
World / Hawaii
World / Indonesian Religious
World / Japan
World / Japanese Pop
World / Klezmer
World / Middle East
World / North America
World / Polka
World / Russian Chanson
World / Sanat
World / South Africa
World / South America
World / Traditional Celtic
World / Worldbeat
World / Zydeco
Ugh. And an album of Various Artists playing/singing Various styles…?
The Genre Police from Apple, who can’t label the correct composer, or give you the right album cover.
The labels are also to share the blame. No doubt about that. But a confused uninformed consumer is the aim.
It’s not maintainable. Narrowing them down or allowing multiple Genres would help.
Additionally, It’s potentially offensive to define music made abroad (depends where you are), by the country. Surely it’s either Pop or Rock or Classical, not African, Japanese…. stupid. The offence work both ways, by the way.
Yes, there are lots of examples where there can be a lot of different styles. Take an album from a festival, like Woodstock. Or a collection of the top hits of a given year. At least movie soundtracks get filed as Soundtrack, so that eliminates the need to be more precise (some movies have many different types of music).
As for the countries, there are some where it has long been standard to cite the country, such as Indian Classical Music, for example. If anything, Apple’s sub-genres allow for a better classification of that “genre.” I’m also pretty sure that there is a tendency for Asian countries to be specific about pop music, such as K-pop and J-pop, which are terms used in the country.
This isn’t a new problem; ID3 tags have a smaller list of genres:
http://www.multimediasoft.com/amp3dj/help/index.html?amp3dj_00003e.htm
So Genres seem to depend on where the listener is (coming) from, and not (exactly) what the musical genre/style is.
Maybe we should go back and relabel The Rolling Stones as, British – Blues-Rock, or Bob Dylan as American – Folk/Rock…
I could go on…
I’ve left a space for someone else to have the last word, I need to go and fix my Genres… 😉
I think Kirk is quite ungrateful of Apple’s unceasingly helpful efforts to fix his tags, album art, and the like. Instead of all this carping, a simple “thank you” would be far more appropriate.
Also, what’s this focus with local music files in your “library”? That’s such 19th century thinking. What’s next? Demanding player piano support in iTunes? Doesn’t Kirk understand that streaming services are #trending with their #disruptive #innovation?
I appreciate and applaud your sarcasm. This said, it’s not local music; it’s music that I added from Apple Music to be able to play without having to search for it each time. So, in a way, it’s straddles the two.
Next step is something like Roon.
I’ve been documenting my own experience with messed up albums, metadata and whatnot. It’s still a complete and wholly horrible mess after all this time. What’s worse is that with iOS I’ve seen albums that utilise the same track into their own separate albums. See https://www.drake.org.uk/apple-music-buggier-than-a-buggy-thing-in-the-land-of-insects/ for more info.
Also: I’d love to see Apple provide an AppleCare/SLA service for their cloud services, including Apple Music, iCloud Photo Library, iCloud Drive and so on. Should provide an incentive to then to do better. But I doubt it’ll ever happen.
It’s a mess. The matched music is all jacked up too. I’ve been forced to re-rip many of my CD’s and store them locally to my devices because the matched audio levels between songs on the same album are so off.
I’ve had a long-running problem with having a hodge-podge of music files, and some time ago I bought a subscription to these guys: http://www.tuneupmedia.com/features – with modest success (it does do a good job, but can also apparently change its own mind on a second pass later on…). I have to admit that it’s pretty much paying money for nothing at this stage because I never have time to go through all my music for hours, verifying that it’s making the right choices. And if what I have got mangled, I’d cry. I try to keep Apple at a bit of a distance from my music collection.
But if they can do this, why can’t Apple? I mean, Apple can surely source the same database (Tune Up are selling access to a database which they licence from Gracenote) or match the technology to get this right?
Correction: Apple uses Gracenote too. So, no excuse really.
Kirk do you ever get any feedback on this stuff from Apple?
Thanks – you may just have saved me a significant headache. Was about to finally spring for Apple Music and Music Match this weekend.
I have a carefully curated library c/w metadata of c. 1200 CDs. I’ve been careful to get it right and to keep it so. Pretty much all of a given artist falls into a single Genre e.g. Frank Sinatra -> Easy Listening. I, like you, only have composer on Classical music – and pretty much 90% of tracks have the correct and normalised e.g. Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827).
I have “reduced” the number of Genres to a more manageable 30 or so (Rock and Popular are the biggies!). I don’t want the zillions of sub-classifications. I’ve been careful to set Album Artist so that I don’t have the silly Artist + collaborator(s) variations which I’d never search by.
Perhaps in 12 months or so when the issues are ironed out.
Etc.
If you think this bad and messed up..Try looking at the state of garageband and M-Audio.. is someone trying to distort apple?? Music software is a GREAT Start..(Tim cook needs to pay more attention to this and move some people and hire people that are really dedicated to apple products and software..) If not ..Apple is going to slowly crumble…. sad!!
I and other users have reported seeing Apple Music song metadata get totally screwed up if you change the track name in iTunes. What’s annoying is that this used to work fine, up until a couple of weeks ago, so I and others have forged ahead and added to or replaced songs from our libraries with streamable Apple Music tracks, only to have them get misplaced on our phones.
It’s immensely frustrating, and @AppleMusicHelp’s response to me was basically that I shouldn’t alter Apple Music track metadata in iTunes. Well, if I’m not supposed to change it, why does iTunes even let you change it in the first place? Why was it working perfectly up until a few weeks ago?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7371256
Compilation albums are also a problem on iOS. The songs should show up under each artist but they only show up under “Compilation Albums”. This bug showed up under iOS 8, it took 6 months to fix (actually the problem was much worse in 8, it was REALLY messed up). Then when iOS 9 released, it shows up again. Whoever is in charge of building the database for the Music app ought to be fired. And don’t get me started about Finder, every release since Mavericks, it gets out of whack and then slowly it gets fixed and then gets broken again the next major release.
“… I don’t use Apple Music for my main music library…”
What DO you use? Or more to the point, what do you recommend? I’m clinging to iTunes 10.6.3 on Snow Leopard but those days will end soon, too many things aren’t working anymore on this OS. Is there credible, non-Apple music software that musicphiles are happy with?
I use the current version of iTunes for my “real” library. I just don’t turn on Apple Music or iCloud Music Library. I wish there were other options, but nothing else can sync to iOS devices.
Wrong, there are other alternatives to iTunes or Apple music, it’s just that they all suck by comparison.
I’m just wondering that Forestall was fired for less… (sarcasm off) But, really, it boggles the mind why would they want to “optimize” and store a single version of a song and point multiple albums to that copy? Who came up with that idea? I bet Apple can afford the extra storage space. So it’s either someone who does not understand music very well that the same song on different albums can be mastered differently, or it’s someone who skipped that CS 101 class where they were teaching not to optimize early in a project.
I’ve wondered about that myself. But if there is no difference in the sound between multiple versions, then iTunes Match can’t tell which version it is. It could use metadata — the album name — which is what Apple Music uses to match tracks. A combination of the two could alleviate the problem of duplicates like this.
I guess they are thinking about Apple Music as a collection of songs. So each songs is an item. Albums are secondary, they just happen to contain songs, but no one should really care because people buy/listen to songs and not albums. (I disagree, but that’s seems like the explanation) Viewed that way multiple albums containing the same song is an annoyance, which they deal with in a way that drives us nuts. _We_ view albums first and _for us_ a song A in album B may very well be a different item from the same song A in album C.
I think Apple has hired a lot of talented software people an d music enthusiast that love rock music and are won’t be musicians over night not to mention influenced by every new gadget that there friends have or speak of.. those of us that are serious apple lovers and are serious musicians (real and do play for gigs ) These young but talented people do not understand how much of a future problem they are causing ..(oh! i play jazz piano) I think apple should bring back a lot of there experienced software tech’s and a few real musicians would not hurt ..
I’m still cleaning up the mess from my 3-month Apple Music trial. The issue that put me over the edge was when it decided that the album version of Here It Goes Again by OK Go — you know, the famous one with the treadmills — no longer existed. Instead, the only version on the planet was the live version that I bought insta-burned to a USB drive at a concert I went to several years ago. I love that version, don’t get me wrong, but it has no place in the studio album. Nothing I could do would convince my iPhone otherwise. Finally, when my Apple Music account expired I nuked my phone’s music library and went back to wired syncing.
“Apple loves music” is meaningless if they literally prevent you from hearing it.
Apple Music not only messed up the songs of several of my ripped CDs but also from albums I purchased from iTunes: One deluxe version suddenly showed up as standard version. A classic album was divided into two separate albums with the exact same title and details. Even after re-downloading from iTunes Store where it is listed as one album as it should be it would be imported as two albums or the pdf booklet would be separate from the music tracks. The composer was spelled in two ways within 4 tracks, that’s just sad.
In a rock album, also bought from iTunes, two tracks were missing and would only play via streaming. I could not download them again, only restore them from a backup I fortunately had made. It really is a chore to use and not fun any more.
Randomly, single tracks were missing.
It appears iMazing is on sale at the moment and is a competitor to iTunes – not that it will solve the cloud issues just that someone asked above for an alternative
I make my own music, and, needing a quick title for the collection of songs that are not finished or fully worked out, I started to call them “Silk Purse.” I’ve done this for years.
The trouble with this is that Apple has “found” the “real” album. Apparently Linda Rondstadt has an album with the same name. Now all of MY MUSIC has Linda Ronstadt’s photo on it.
I agree with all of this, but my request is simple: I want to see my lists (artist, album, song…) sorted properly.
On my 6S, view my music by artist, and I see all my music sorted by artist’s name. View by song, and I see all songs, sorted by song title. Sort by album and I see all albums, sorted by…. artist name?
WTF?
The entity submitting the song to iTunes sets these attributes NOT Apple.
The entity screwing with personal metadata is Apple…
Apple Music is shite…. I built a playlist from songs that I had bought from iTunes, CD’s I have accumulated over the years and stuff that I had picked up from Soundcloud etc – freely available stuff…
And what does Apple Music do when I try to add this playlist to my iPhone from my Mac?? Deletes everything I have added from Soundcloud et al and replaces a huge number of tracks that I have stored on my Mac!!! So I end up with different versions of the song I OWN on my playlist and the playlist switches to downloading these shite versions that I don’t want from the cloud when I have the versions I want right on my Mac….
To make it worse I cannot add the playlist to my iPhone at all…
I spent a few days building this playlist – it has 1,300 songs on it and Apple came along and fucked me. For some bonkers reason Apple has determined that what it has stored in Apple Music is the only version of any song you may have and what you actually own or have collected on your device is irrelevant and not worth having…
It is a *** storm encompassing a *** sandwich inside a *** house. *****.
As far as Apple Music is concerned it can *****.
[Moderator edited out some of the words above, just because I don’t really like comments that go in that direction.]
I’d be as annoyed as you (Boris) had that happened to my library.
Luckily, I didn’t jump in, waited, saw that personal metadata was being interfered with, and knew I’d steer clear.
Apple can’t undo this. Once trust has gone, that’s it.
Off topic but I absolutely hate (Deluxe) everything album titles. I can almost bet they count both the regular and deluxe titles as two albums and double count all tracks available in iTunes store.
Realistically, aren’t these problems with metadata and overlapping databases simply too complicated to fix? As I read Kirk and the comments, the issues simply seem too intricate to be resolved, especially retroactively. Frankly, it seems insoluble.
I would like to see the possibility for users to flag tracks that are incorrectly matched, to provide information to get the correct tracks, which would help apple fix this problem overall. That might be difficult to implement, but, as things are now, there is nothing at all that users can do.
Seems pretty simple to solve. When trying to match song, match on song name, album, and song length. If that does not match, upload song. If they had done that all my issues would have not been issues…
What if there was a different remaster? You can only match to one. What if there is no album name? iTunes Match uses digital fingerprinting, so it can identify such differences. Apple Music, however, only match is metadata. So if you’re metadata is bad, you will get bad matches.
My metadata is good. I’d happily pay an extra 25 a year for that to work. Are you saying if I do, the problems will be solved??
Listening to pink Floyd the wall on my iPhone that got matched in the cloud, and another brick in the wall part 2 is a live version completely unrelated. How can you break an album like that???!!! Listening to a live phish show I got at a phish concert, Halloween Vegas 2014, where set 2 they covered a Halloween album, one song called timber – all the rest of the songs that had names that did not match phish songs were uploaded and played fine, but because phish also has a song timber (different lyrics, length, album) I get that song instead on my iPhone. Stupid.
I’d like to see someone do some reporting on these issues from a relational database point of view. I suspect the entire problem is that songs lack unique identifier keys, and even thinking about how to either do this or how to think about implementing it starting today is a head-splitting nightmare. Instead, matching is done on things that arent unique.
The whole system is evidence against Intelligent Design. We adapt the best we can, but I suspect we can’t get to ideal from here. We also can’t go back to the beginning.
One thing I discovered when analyzing the database on an iPhone is that there is a unique ID for artists, albums, and tracks. There has to be, as far as the iTunes Store is concerned. So it is very surprising how they make this kind off mistake. The unique ID should have prevented the problem I describe here, but it wouldn’t ensure that the correct version of a song is found when matching CD rips or downloads.
Believe it or not but in the latest version of iTunes you don’t even need to switch on Apple Music to get messed up metatags… https://discussions.apple.com/message/29488581?ac_cid=op123456#29488581
I ran into this article while looking for a list of genres as they appear in iTunes Producer…. yet another thing Apple doesn’t match up on… the genres (for distributors) who use iTunes Producer… are completely different than the genres being displayed on the itunes store –– Anyway, I wanted to help you with your tagging problem. Your best bet is to edit the tags (if you’re on a Mac) with Qoobar BEFORE adding them to itunes –– You can download qoobar at http://qoobar.sourceforge.net/en/download.htm –– Otherwise, if your music is already on iTunes, then remove it, tag it with qoobar, then re-add it to your library.
Kirk – do you think Apple even cares about fixing the metadata issues in iCML? Or do you think they view this as a power user issue and not worth their time to fix.
Tough question. My guess is they think it only affects a small percentage of users, but also that it’s such a vast problem that they don’t even know where to start.
Kirk – so i’ve tried iCML once again and lo and behold it hasn’t killed my metadata (for the most part). I’ve run into one issue and I wanted to see if you’ve seen it before… on iOS devices only within the “Album” view, some of my tracks are replacing track and album name with text i have in the “Grouping” field within itunes. This only happens where the tracks are viewed within the album structure (ie. Album, Artist, Genres). The tracks appear correctly when viewed in “Song” view or if viewed within a playlist. What’s weird is this only occurs on iOS devices. No problem on macOS, tvOS or even on Android (embarrassing). Since iCML is theoretically the source for all these devices, I can’t understand why the issue would only crop up on iOS devices. Have you seen or heard of this? Thanks
That is odd. It happens on multiple iOS devices? In that case, it’s the cloud database that’s messed up. You could try removing the tracks from your iTunes library, waiting a while, then re-adding them to see what happens.
Only on iOS devices and it happens on all of them. I’lll try removing and adding and see if that helps. Just when I get my hopes up about iCML… 🙂
I think it is time we revisited this article. While the 1st 6 months of Apple Music and the iCloud Music Library were rocky, my experience for the last year has been stellar – and iTunes ability to now work with my 24×96 sources and make lossy versions for the cloud has been insanely good, as it allows me to keep a lossless library int iTunes at the fidelity I record shows at and have it seamlessly flow to my iPhone. I couldn’t ask for a better celestial jukebox….
I was very happy when I stopped having metadata issues. But as I stated in my Jan 19 post, I’ve run into issues again. Hopefully they clear up for me. Regardless, i agree that iCML is much improved since its original launch
On my iMac I have a large, curated iTunes library, consisting of over 80,000 songs and many playlists that I’ve been gradually building since 2002.
I’m enjoying Apple Music and the recommendations it is making. Based on Kirk’s advice, I turned on iCloud Music Library only on my iPhone, and left it off on my iMac.
But that has some limitations, namely the inability to add new tracks to my existing playlists. As a result they are frozen in time. I’m also unable to sync them any more to my iPhone as you can’t manually sync music once iCloud Music Library is on.
So I’ve made several backups, and I’m going to turn iCloud Music Library on on all my devices and my iMac. I’ll report back on how I make out.
I feel your pain. I have over 25,000 rap songs, and ITunes Apple music don’t care about the producer, nor spelling the artist name the same throughout the library.
I use musosis, which is a mapping service that does not alter your files, but provides the detail on vocalists and producers the others don’t.
It has some cool features like, filter by IsExplicit and Songs I don’t have by.
https://www.musosis.com/
Sorry only for rap music at this stage.
I have a couple problems with the iTunes Store on my iOS device, unable to get any help or useful info from “support” reps. First, the “soundtracks/musicals” list is pitifully incomplete. There are tons of musicals that you can find if you search by name, but aren’t in the genre list. Makes it really hard to browse for new stuff. Second, the “name” tab in featured lists, which is alphabetical, tends to only populate halfway thru the alphabet. Again, it’s unfair to both artists and listeners when the only albums that show up are ones that start with A-L, for example. Tried more than once to contact support about this, with screenshots and all, only to be told (AFTER several emails exchanged) that I’m talking to the wrong department and to start over with someone else. Without providing me a surefire way of reaching that someone else. I’ve just about given up on ever finding answers here, but this thread seems to have some clever folks up in it lol