Music is separating some of my albums

[FrankT]

Has anyone else experienced this?:
The phenomena is that every once in a while I’ll look through my albums and in a few instances where once there was one album are now two albums with the same name, one of them contains only a few tracks from the original solitary album. Weird.

I am not subscribed to Apple Music nor have ever been to any of their services. My library consists entirely of recordings from CDs.

In preferences, Sync Library is unchecked. Update Artwork is unchecked. I do have “Keep Music Media folder organized” Which is the only vector I can imagine for this irritating bug.

I haven’t nailed down the conditions as to when this splitting occurs. It seems random, though it could coincide with OS updates ( I just updated to 10.15.7). There may be a pattern to the albums it targets but I haven’t been able to figure that either. I only notice it on a few albums each time, out of 2000+ albums.

Mostly wondering if anyone else has experienced this.
Cheers.

Catalina 10.15.7 Music 1.0.6.10

[geoffaire]

I have had it in the past.

• Selecting all in the album and setting the same album name sometimes helps, or;
• ensuring that the Album artist is the same for all tracks
  But sometimes it still keeps them as 2, in that instance setting the album as a compilation will bring the tracks together, BUT it will move the album out of the artists folder and into the compilations folder in your file structure. I gave up on Music when they split up iTunes and use Plex instead.

[WayneG]

Music (Apple) anomaly :: how to fix a split in two CD

There may be easier ways to fix this but this is how I’ve done it in the past: Open Music and go to Songs view. Right Click on the first song choose Get Info and review each item in the Detail and Sorting tabs. Continue through the entire list. Something will be different on one or more of the fields in each of the “split” songs. That is what has divided the CD. Once all fields in all songs are the same the CD should go back together. Copy & Past will be your friend in accomplishing this.

[xfactor9600]

I used to hate when this occurred in the original Itunes. It could be maddening to determine what was different.

[FrankT]

Thanks. Yes, I’ve become an expert at rejoining albums.
Interestingly, with these bug-splits there is nothing different in any of the fields.
My fix method is to temporarily add the same character to the end of the album title, after entering the character on the second split they join back up, and then I correct the album title.

I miss the old days of iTunes when you could drag an album onto another and they would join up. (That was a while back.)

[FrankT]

I should mention that it splits off seemingly random tracks. One I repaired recently the split had tracks 7,9 and 13.

[tonycraine]

I never had this happen until after I joined Apple Music, so I’ve always assumed it’s one of the “benefits” of iCloud Music Library. But, yes, I too have split albums all over my library.

I’ve never done a close inspection, but I’ve always assumed they’re all albums I ripped from CDs and that iCloud Music Library tried to identify by whatever algorithm it uses. I guess it’s the app, not the cloud, that is doing the damage.

[jec0047]

I’m pretty sure @WayneG has the right idea: The metadata of the songs has gotten out of sync with each other. I had this issue in iTunes and also in Music.

[BradG]

This has happened to me through various iTunes & Music iterations. – and sometimes digging in the metadata would solve it, other times it would not.

The issue was finally resolved by my swearing to never open Music on any of my Macs again – and instead to only wrestle with the Music app over on iOS… /s

Joy.