Weird iOS Music app Compilation bug

1) I have a number of compilation albums. I think the they are tagged correctly i.e. Artist = name of performer of track; Album Artist is blank and Compilation check-box is clicked

2) Sync a compilation album to iPhone.

3) Looking at the Library -> Compilations on iPhone, some of the single albums in MacOS Music app are broken into multiple albums in iOS Music app

What seems to happen is if there are other albums in your library where the Album Artist = the Artist of one or more tracks on the Compilation album then these tracks are put on their own album. You can see this with the "Help" album below. It is one album in the Mac Music but 9 on my iPhone seemingly because I have albums from "Manic Street Preachers", "Massive Attack", "The Stone Roses", "Suede", "O'Connor, Sinead", "Radiohead", "The Charlatans" and "Blur" but not from the other artists on the album.

Is this some sort of "feature"?

What you are describing seems to be a ITunes bug for a long time.  
 

There seems to be a manual fix where you click the box to make the album as a compilation, then unclick the compilation  selection, and in this case click again (it’s a great album you’ve chosen!). This should get all the songs in one album. Also for compilations I put the Album Artist as Various and the Artist field as the correct band/artists.

I have given up trying to fix every album in my library where all the meta data is the same but Itunes splits at least one track into a separate album.

My other bugbear is ITunes mobile app overwriting the album art with artwork from a podcast I subscribe to. 

I always complete the Album Artist field - for compilations I use “Various Artists”

Even with huge libraries it’s a trivially easy thing to fix, using a cheap tagging software app (I use Metadatics, but there are others.. Yate ? etc)

What's annoying is in the Music app on my Mac everything is fine. I can go to Artists, click on Compilations and each album is a single album.

The problem is on iOS where there seems to be no way to play an compilation album if some of the Artists are also Album Artists on others albums.

I have the same thing and it drives me mad. It should be a simple business to just carry over the metadata to my phone when transferring files, but it would appear not.

Also very annoyed when the Music app assigns random artwork to a compilation album based on the presence of an artist: eg an 80s comp that has a single track by, say, Bananarama, will have all the tracks assigned  the 'Greatest Hits Of Bananarama' artwork.

We're nearly 25 years down the line on iTunes, and we still get bugs like this?

suspect they’re not “bugs” but “features” of the Apple music world…. 10+ years ago I went through the same sort if pain/ dismay/ confusion trying to understand why Apple Music (iTunes then) didn’t behave logically….

you have to realise that not all ‘metadata’ is the same… there is a bunch of metadata that comes with your music files (FLAC, AIFF, ALAC, whatever) and that metadata is (mostly) common/ consistent. When you save a FLAC with a piece of metadata called ‘Album’ it gets used as ‘Album’ almost universally, in all player software. If you choose (deliberately or by just not realising) to leave some metadata empty then you may get different behaviour with different software, so my recommendation is to use a good tagging programme and make sure all your metadata is completed, else in the Apple Music world there’s other metadata lurking around and Apple will happily fill in some of it by itself during playback.

I’ve had cases where I play an album and 9 of 10 tracks show one pice of cover art, the other track doesn’t. I eventually worked out to force a cover art jpg into every single saved track file, and not rely on the folder.jpg cover art in the album folder, then it works fine. 

How “compilations” are played is also a weird one… I’d recommend really looking at the metadata to see if there are inconsistencies in your music files. As I said, all my problems with Apple Music have gone since I fixed, consistently, all my trackfile metadata…. I don’t give Apple or any other programme/ software the chance to make things up for me….

apologies that this is a bit rambling… couldn’t work out how to be concise…

I haven't updated my iPhone 12 mini to the latest IOS in about 18 months, so imagine my surprise after finally updating to 17.5 this week that I encountered this same "glitch" when I uploaded a revised compilation. It was same thing said by OP, that it's one album listed as Compilation in the Music app on my Mac, but then once on my iPhone, it went on to show as 3 separate albums, since two of the artists included also have solo albums on my phone music library. 

Thanks for the suggestion to write Various Artists in the Album Artist field in the track meta data, a field which I normally ignore when I adjust meta data. It seems to now show the album only once as a Compilation. Still though, how annoying! 

I have been having this issue for some time also. Figured I would post my testing results here. My biggest issue is that the Artists that exist on compilations as well as regular albums do not show up under Artists on iPhone Music once transferred. For example, Smashing Pumpkins exists on the Singles Soundtrack, so Smashing Pumpkins does not show up under Artists on iPhone. Irritating. This is not consistent either, some artists on compilations do show up under Artists. Computer blew up recently, so reloading things and decided to try and fix. 

Unfortunately I have been a long time user of itunes from back to the iPod days. Music is important, so i went to iPhones eventually. My library of 17k+ songs is very well maintained. I have learned many lessons, too many to remember, on how to configure this all to make it work. What I do know is my compilations are checked as such. I also use "sort album" to put year of release and title, so for most part they show up chronologically. For compilations I use "9999" before year/title to put those last. I do not use Album Artist field on compilations in iTunes, but checking my metadata it does appear Various Artists is inserted there somehow.

So I loaded ONLY regular albums and synced to iPhone. Artists show up. Then I add compilations and resync, Artists still exist. Remove music from iPhone and resync all together, artists are gone now. Seems through most of my testing on this, if you add regular albums (or even all artists, including the artist's compilation tracks) and THEN you add the compilations, you retain all artists in the iPhone artist list. If you resync they stay. However, if you have to remove all the music, and add together, it breaks it again. 

This is crazy annoying. How do you all deal with this issue? Thinking about making my compilations "not compilations" anymore to see if i can find an answer. Assume its an issue with Various artists, as soon as you have an artist that is also on a various artist compilation, they no longer show up in artists on iphone.  You can go search for them on the albums list, but they show up after your regular alphabetical albums, in no certain order, so its a real pain to find one.  Anyway, sorry for long post but would love suggestions!!


 

Well, after quite a bit of wasted time testing, the above suggestion to check/uncheck all of my compilations, as well as adding "Various Artists" in to the Album artist field for compilations has maybe fixed things? 

Going to do more testing, but thanks all. wish there was a better music manager for iphone, but im pretty integrated at this point

When done as above, compilation tracks only show up under Various Artists, and not under each artist as they used to. IDK, probably reasons this is done the way it is, but i like others find it frustrating as hell