In short: If Apple Music is splitting albums, make sure all of the metadata fields all match, then tick and untick the “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists” checkbox then click OK.
When tracks from the same album are split, it means there’s no common value in the Album Artist field and the “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists” flag is not checked.
If you don’t want Apple Music to split albums, the properties should look like this:
If you have trouble with Apple Music splitting albums, you can make sure all the metadata matches, tinker with the compilation checkbox, or rename the album name.
Make sure all the metadata match
The biggest reason why albums keep splitting on Apple Music is because the metadata of the “separate” albums doesn’t match. It’s as simple as that.
Check if the “artist” and “album artist” are slightly different between one and the other. It has happened to a lot of people and simply making them the same fixed the issue.
Select all of the tracks that you want to merge and click Command-I (the command (⌘) button and the alphabet I) to show the Get Info window for the selected files and view their metadata.
Find the different metadata and make them the same.
“Unknown artist” means you’ve deleted the Artist value (or none was present before). This needs to stay as-is and you shouldn’t change it.
On the other hand, if you see “Mixed” it means the values in two or more selected tracks are different. This is the one you have to change.
If there is any metadata shown faintly as “Mixed” change it to whatever it should be (other than comments, or things like track, or disk, which should be different).
Click OK and see whether they have merged.
Remember, when updating the properties of the metadata you need to make sure that all the tracks that comprise the album are selected, otherwise it won’t work.
Tinker with the compilation checkbox
Select all of the tracks that you want to merge and click Command-I (the command (⌘) button and the alphabet I) to show the Get Info window for the selected files and view their metadata.
Check your metadata fields and make sure all of them match, and if so, tick the “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists” and then click OK.
Then, click Command-I again to show the Get Info window again and untick “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists” then click OK.
After you’ve clicked OK, check to see whether they have merged or not.
I had a split album once where none of the metadata was “Mixed” and it was fixed simply by changing the “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists” checkbox.
Rename the album name
If you’ve checked the metadata and they’re all the same, but the album has been split, rename both fields of the split albums to “Album name 2” then rename. This always works for me.
To perform this operation, you’ll need to use a computer, either a Mac computer or a Windows PC. You can’t rename the album name on a mobile device.
Often, just changing the album name to something random causes them to merge together. Then, I just changed it back to the real album name. It’s definitely an annoying issue to have.
Remember, when updating the properties of the metadata you need to make sure that all the tracks that comprise the album are selected, otherwise it won’t work.
I think this is the best advice for someone who spends a lot of time organizing songs on Apple Music. Do yourself a favor and don’t use a “metadata scanning and cleaning” tool.
There are different types of widely used metadata standards and some of them don’t play nicely with each other. Some of these metadata standards only work on specific file types as well.
A headache indeed.
Apple tries to make everything simple by showing you the same editing options for your entire music while hiding the incompatibilities between these standards.
Apple hides this from you and manages it in a database stored on your computer.
This is a super delicate system working behind AM. If you’re curious about this I recommend looking at the Digital Music section of the Metadata article on Wikipedia.
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