Hatred of Itunes

ok i don't think this would solve my problem though

each song on album shows up in 'Recently Added' as if on separate albums (even if they're all by same artist)
songs appear if you search for them but not in artist/song/album

can u ignore that i drag files onto my phone like a philistine and address these parts

i uninstalled & reinstalled itunes and it didnt solve problem, considering doing same for iOS music but worried i will lose everything on there now

that seems like it may require some metadata fiddling in itunes, if the duplicate "album" shows up there

can you just delete those songs from your phone

this happens to any new music i add

Dragging and dropping caused me all kinds of grief, but your issue does sound like it could be metadata related. I always have to clean up stuff I've gotten from Soulseek. Select all the songs from the album at once and "show info" and at the very least make sure the album title and artist are there. I've had to paste album art with all songs selected to get them to appear as one album on occasion.

I would recommend giving up on drag and drop -- you DON'T need a smart playlist to do it, you just need a regular playlist if you don't want to mess with rules. Call the playlist iPhone, drag and drop whatever you want on your phone into the playlist, and tell iTunes to only sync that playlist to your phone. Syncing will take a bit longer since it'll do a backup every time, but it really solved so many issues for me.

Just saw your last post -- if it's happening with everything you add, I bet it's the drag and drop. Try the playlist sync.

ugh the backup takes so long tho :(((

thx tho i will try

Excitedly bought a 256GB iPhone 8 in anticipation of never having to worry about room for all the music I wanted to listen to on my phone. Excitement became irritation, rage and despair as I could no longer drag and drop music to the phone, then created a playlist to sync music to it, only to run into this tracks-become-untitled-albums problem. I know that as a person who owns, maintains, and manually copies a large music library, I am no longer Apple's typical use case, but my GOD this is frustrating.

Interestingly it doesn't seem to be a problem with the files themselves; if you view the contents of the phone within iTunes (now my most feared and loathed piece of software) all the metadata is correct. Also if you use an app to view and play music on the phone that's not the standard Music app (say Ecoute), the metadata is screwed up the same as it is inside Music. So there's a filesystem problem here. Given the fact that iTunes deliberately obfuscates the files on your phone, to prevent you from copying music off of it, it was probably inevitable given Apple's decline in software quality that this would happen. I filed bugs on it, but I'm not sure how fast they'll move on it. 11.1 public beta doesn't address this.

Hm, maybe 'registry problem' is a better way to put it than 'filesystem problem', since it seems to be about how iOS11 at the OS-level reads and locates the music files, not the files themselves or how macOS or iOS apps read the files. Thinking about it that way maybe there's hope, since they just need to do a better job of authoring the file that iOS reads to find music.

iOS11 has syncing bugs I can confirm. In the Music library on the phone, one album (and only that album) has all the track names replaced by what's in the Grouping tag. But when I play the song, the correct info is shown on the Now Playing screen.

Eh, they'll figure it out sooner or later.

I doubt it's filesystem-related, it looks like the music library database gets screwed up on sync with certain data written to the wrong fields. When the file is actually played, the Music app rereads the actual tag info, and all is well again.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at with 'registry', realized belatedly that 'filesystem' wasn't the word - my bad

In my case Music app never reads the metadata correctly, it still thinks the track has no album information when played. The info is there; iTunes can read it just fine

But yep hoping for a before-11.1 solution, cos that's a long time to wait

FWIW, Plex has its own database structure, and keeps its synced music completely separate from other apps. Not ideal, but at least you're free of Apple's sync bugs.

The problem is, Plex's sync is just shit - transfers are super slow, and the sync process frequently stops without ever resuming. And almost ten years in, it still doesn't handle compilations/'album artist' correctly.

I've definitely been shopping around for alternatives - there are decent clients on macOS (Swinsian) and on iOS, the missing piece is transferring the files smoothly to the phone, all the things I've looked at (latest being MediaTrans) are pretty sketched out. If anyone solves that, I would gladly part with substantial $$$. It may be the magic client is already out there and I just haven't found it ...

Coworker just told me that Spotify used to recognize files that you dragged to your phone, which I had no idea about. Looks like that option's been removed, though

Thanks for the heads up on Plex, I thought they were just a desktop or Apple TV thing; I wouldn't mind trying this out ....

These guys are intriguing https://roonlabs.com/howroonworks.html - but sounds like mobile sync is a long way off, still https://community.roonlabs.com/t/mobile-music-sync-and-streaming-on-roadmap/15249/3

Bear in mind tho that phone sync with Plex is a premium (paid) feature.

Yep, saw that - I'm a little scared of the transcoding it seems to demand

if you choose original quality it doesn't transcode

I've used it remotely for other stuff but I was even lazy and just streamed off my home server straight to my phone last week.

From looking around it seems that Plex has a good foundation to stick around for a while; this winter i'll see about creating a real NAS server to run it. Thanks for the recommendation! Right now I'm just loading my iTunes library over a network, there's not a server per se

there are much cheaper options but I've got this sucker for my movies and am slowly offloading music on it. it'll run an iTunes-style server, too: https://www.wdc.com/products/network-attached-storage/my-cloud-pr2100.html

I was about to pull the trigger on the Synology DS218+, which is essentially the same thing. QNAP also makes decent ones

What's the file system on that my cloud thing?

Oh just in case anyone runs across this thread later, looks like Synology can use Backblaze, I figured I was going to be SOL on offsite backup, nice surprise

xp you know, it lets you log in via ssh and actually run docker containers (all of the "apps" are a thin gui over containerized stuff) but I've never actually checked? it does RAID based on options you select and my general non-work ethos is to not give a shit

it might just be ext2, I'd have to connect at home and check

yeah, the WD NAS options allow off-site backup stuff too

I've used the built-in integrations (the GUI and plugins) to connect Dropbox and a few other things

Brakhage, search for the album you’re having a problem with and edit info. The last id tag will let you modify how you sort that album. Play around with that for a while

*carefully play around with that. I have an album with 120 different artists/tracks. I was able to keep each individual artist tag and have the artist (album artist?) sorted as ‘various’ so that I didn’t have 120 artists popping up on my phone when I selected the artist tab in the music app.

Sometimes I have albums show up twice or more when there is little differences in the metadata as well. Like if the band is spelled Doopees vs DOOPEES. Basically whenever the album’s sort IDs don’t match slightly.

mh - I'm just wondering how it could have read / write compatibility with macs and windows stuff as advertised and not be FAT and limited to 4 GB per file

or maybe you have to choose your OS when you set up the box. that's probably it.

xp I hear you on the sorting stuff Flopsy, have been bitten by that before, but I shouldn't have to retag 2TB of files cos iOS suddenly can't read a field correctly. It's worth experimenting with to see if changing that on one LP makes a difference though, good shout

I found something yesterday that makes me think this problem is more fundamental - all of the books I have loaded manually (12.7 moved this to a menu called 'File Sharing' when the phone is connected) in my Kindle app are gone, but only on the phone; again, viewed through iTunes, everything is there. So this seems to be a problem that affects any manually copied file

Maybe this has something to do with the introduction of the Files viewer? Though I had none of these problems running iOS11 on an iphone 6.

calstars, it's a network share. You can attach other drives directly to copy *to* it, but it's a network file server. So the only way you get files to and from it normally is via SMB, NFS, or even AFP. It doesn't matter what it uses internally because it's never mounted as a hard drive.

fwiw you can turn any of those options on or off at any time, although SMB is the preferred protocol on both macos and windows now, iirc

I have no idea if this question has been dealt with here before or not. I have some of the music on my Mac synced over to my phone using playlists. A few weeks ago I realized a lot of ID3 tags were just incorrect -- like, one song on an album would be by Various Artists instead of the actual artist. I fixed those tags in itunes on my Mac, but the corrections won't sync over to the phone. Searching reveals that this has been a major thing for a long time, but I couldn't find any fixes. Has anyone else had this problem?

Yes, this is an error since iOS 11, the syncing of the tags is messed up. Everybody's waiting for a fix. Temporary solution: use another music player app, one that doesn't use the iOS Music database, such as Pyro.

Both Ecoute and Serato Pyro have the same problems reading tags properly, unfortunately ... it's at the OS level, not the app level, from my testing. Hoping the solution when it arrives won't force a wipe and restore

er, require, not force

In other news aside from the migration being hellish due to the formatting on the disks holding the original files being somewhat bad and the NAS OS being unable to deal, the Synology is fantastic; should have made this move years ago

Are you sure? Pyro fixes all metadata problems I have, it seems to rescan every file itself (for BPM detection) and in the process picks up the correct tags.

Could apple make it any fucking harder to take a playlist from itunes and keep the order on the ipod itself

guessing just easier to make the order on the ipod instead t's been awhile since i've done this)

xp for me Pyro handles the files identically; the LPs that managed to survive iOS11 are intact, just as they are in the Music app, and the vast majority are sharded across a million unknown album titles

If you think it's got to build its own index over a while I can pop it back on the phone and let it sit idle for a while to figure things out, though. Will give it a shot

I let Pyro churn for a while but I got a little freaked out by the heat all that disk activity was generating and stopped that. But ...

I managed to sort out the unknown-albums issue on the phone. Here's what I did:

Originally I was autofilling the phone from a giant playlist. I switched it to *syncing* that same playlist, not autofilling from it. (Which is confusing because the autofill option appears to have gone away now; I can't find it.) When I switched that preference, iTunes told me it was going to wipe the music from the phone, which I said okay to, then it began syncing the playlist. When it completed, the phone began reading all the tags correctly.

Also, I'd force-quit the Music app while all this was happening, just in case it became confused

my last post to this thread was a great success so here's hoping yall can fix this one

songs don't play on iTunes (on my laptop). press play, and it just sits at 0:00 and doesn't budge

haven't changed anything