I have old CD albums that over the years I have imported into iTunes. These albums are compilation albums and between one compilation and another there are, inevitably, som duplicate tracks. This is all fine, until you enable Apple Music sync.
With Apple Music sync it recognises that there are duplicates and as a result only syncs one of the tracks belonging to one of the albums and skips the rest. This makes the other compilation albums incomplete on other Music sync devices such as my iPhone. So, when I listen to one album I get all the music, but if I listen to another album several tracks are missing.
I have a call in with Apple Support to find a remedy to this, but does anyone else have a similar experience and found a solution?
Do you have anything in the āAlbum Artistā field? For instance, what I use, āVarious Artistsā. Of course, this might not work for compilations of only 1 artist (a Greatest Hits LP), but for those, I uncheck the ācompilationā boxā¦
This is one reason I have avoided Apple Music sync. Others reported that it messed up playlists and music not purchased through Apple.
Oddly enough the Music app on my Apple TV seems to know my locally stored music without enabling sync.
In the case I cited, itās not songs that are from compilation albums. The song is āSultans of Swingā by Dire Straits, which I have on multiple albums, but the version that plays whenever I try to play the original song from the studio album āDire Straitsā is the live version from the album āAlchemyā. (I have other live versions from concert recordings I have purchased after seeing a live show, but they are all from the artist āMark Knopflerā rather than Dire Straits.)
So, I have been on to Apple Support about this and it seems there is a āfeatureā of iCloud music library that really doesnāt like duplicates even when they are on different albums. Essentially iCloud Music will only upload or match one of them if they are albums that Apple doesnāt know about. So 90ās compilation albums in the UK are no longer catalogued, so Apple Music doesnāt think they exist, but of course my import of a CD and CDDB says they do. Anyway, long story short it is possible to unmarked a track as a duplicate by deleting the track from iTunes but leave the media on the computer and then re-importing the media and select File->Library->Update iCloud Music Library. Of course you have to do that for every duplicate, and I have a lot of duplicates. Im still working with support on a bulk solution to this, but it likely involves exporting all my playlists, deleting everything in iTunes, and re-importing the media which is organised by artist and album, then re-importing the playlists. Iāll let you know how it turns out.
In my case I have identical tracks on different albums - same original recording. Apple Music does seem to use the fingerprint of the track as it will identify duplicates with different titles (eg āThe Size of a Cowā vs āSize of a Cowā, both 3:13 long, on different albums and identified as duplicate).
This sounds so convoluted. Can you explain a bit better if you get a chance.
Why do Apple do this, just to save minuscule amounts of storage space?!
Surely there are millions of Apple Music app users with albums where the exact same track appears in more than one album, yet Apple decide the second/third/etc versions should somehow vanish from those albumsā tracklists. Utter waste of users time and completely needless PIA to boot.
Ok. I have been through this with Apple support and where we got to was that I needed to delete the duplicate tracks in iTunes and re-import the track from my media file (iTunes Music on my Mac). This needs to be done a per track basis according to Apple support. This sucks as a solution, but as the support person pointed out I am running iTunes 12.9.5.5 on Mojave 10.14.6 and the recommended plan is to upgrade to the latest OS and use Apple Music instead of iTunes. Sadly, I canāt do this because I have legacy 32-bit apps that I canāt afford to replace right now (Adobe CS6),
Instead of taking the Apple solution at face value I have tried some other approaches. Firstly I deleted all my music from the Apple Music Cloud (not straightforward, I had to create a new libraries and all sorts) and then tried re-upload my media from iTunes to Apple Music cloud. Still have the duplicate items problem. So now I am trying the approach of not turning on Apple Music Cloud on my Mac, but rather I am syncing the Mac to my phone using iTunes sync and then using the phone to upload to Apple Music Cloud from its own version of Apple Music. So far this is a bit working - but the upload of 5,612 tracks seems to be taking days and days so canāt confirm if it has worked yet.
Yesterday downloaded the latest script for changing the number of plays count from Dougās Scripts. This was for a mbp14 running Monterey. It worked without any problems.
The underlying problem is that this is a feature not a bug. Apple deliberately donāt upload more than one version of any track by design to āsave spaceā. The fact it screws-up users listening experience doesnāt seem to bother them!
Yet another of Appleās āautomatic featuresā that should actually be a setting choice, not a requirement of Appleās own choosing.
This calls to mind a feature Iād love Apple to add - a āvirtual trackā.
I, like most people, own āgreatest hitsā compilation albums, where most (if not all) of the tracks have been previously released on other albums. In order to avoid wasting space, I donāt keep these duplicates when I own the original albums. So many of those greatest hits albums, in my Library, only have one or two tracks. And some donāt exist at all (because every track appears elsewhere).
Today, I work around this by making playlists for these albums, which pull the appropriate tracks from the library.
Ideally, I would like Apple to add the ability to create a āvirtual songā. One that exists as a new entry in the music database, but references another song for the actual music data, allowing you to override metadata (especially album, artwork, track and disc numbers) on a per-field basis, using the values from the original song for those you donāt override.
This would be the best of both worlds - no wasted space on duplicate audio data, but intact and complete compilation albums.
Great idea. I donāt really mind either way āsetting for more than one copy or virtual trackā just as long as they stop the current idiocy. Which of course they wonāt.
