Yet Another Apple Music Anomaly

TidBITS Talk
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The CDDB data is frequently wrong, or at least with minor errors. And misuse/abuse of the Compilation flag is a biggie.

I always review the metadata on a CD before I click the import button.

As for what should be done if a track’s Artist field features a guest? The solution is the “Album Artist” field. Set it to the primary artist for all tracks on the album. This will override the Artist field for the purpose of album grouping and it will sort with that artist instead of with the rest of the compilations.

But don’t use Album Artist for only some tracks on a single album. If some use it and some don’t, the two groups of tracks will be treated as separate albums. Similarly, don’t use both Album Artist and the compilation checkbox on a single album - that will almost certainly not result in what you want.

But don’t ever expect public databases like Gracenote/CDDB to get this right. It’s all crowdsourced data and a large percentage of contributors don’t understand what these fields are supposed to be. Always review and fix the metadata before you rip the disc.

You can submit your metadata to CDDB after making your fixes. But it won’t change the current data. It will simply (if accepted) add yours to the database, so future people will see two (or more) sets of metadata for the CD.

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Can we harken back a few steps for a sec.
I am curious as to, or whether if, folks have witnessed the Apple Music Abeyance Protocol (ok I made that up)

Perhaps one might expect the following symptom to related to imported files, but Apple Music, in my experience, has a penchant for not recognizing its own Store bought content fully.
As mentioned earlier, the majority of my originally imported tracks failed to appear in any listing in the app.
But this also happens with Store content.
This might have something to do with cloud syncing I suppose, but this can also happen after downloading all the tracks of a recent purchase. … I shoulda taken some screenshots or recording to illustrate this.

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Idea: change the title of this thread to something more specific to your preferred topic.

1 Like
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I distrust the CDDB data enough that I don’t let Music fetch from it at all. I’d rather manually add all the relevant metadata by hand than have to correct someone else’s. I’ll just load up Discogs or AllMusic and pick out the right metadata on my own.