iTunes wont leave my genres alone

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mightyepop

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Hi all, new member here,

I've been using iTunes for over 10 years now, but I am currently fed up with one perennial problem that I've never been able to find a fix for. It is almost enough for me to consider moving to an entirely different platform.

I have very carefully created a set of Genres for my music collection. Every time I add music to my collection, sorting it into the correct genre is something I spend time doing. This works fine with songs I've added from ripping CDs or converting my old record albums, however it does not work at all with songs I purchased from the iTunes store.

It seems that every time I visit the iTunes store, every song I ever purchased from them are reset to the original genres that they had when I downloaded them. These are generally meaningless to me - overbroad genres such as "Pop", "Rock", "Pop/Rock", etc. Music wildly mismatched, with (for example) light orchestral music by Mantovani and the like being classified as "Rock" or "Classical" seemingly at random.

Now, my original genre classifications are not lost. If I click on the song and "Get Info", my changes are visible, and when I click "OK", my info becomes visible. But I have over 1200 songs I purchased, and doing this for each song after visiting the iTunes store is a major hassle.

Another problem I have with this is that visiting the iTunes store also resets the "Year" field. The iTunes Store doesn't date a song by the year it was released, like normal people would do, but rather by the last time the record company released it (or renewed the copyright). So I have situations where the Doors "Light My Fire" and the Turtles "Happy Together" are listed as having been released in 2008. The latest version of iTunes doesn't seem to retain my corrections for Years, so it looks like I will have to manually change that again.

Does anyone know of a solution for this? If I can't find a solution, I am tempted to switch to a different platform altogether, one that will allow me to manage my collection without interference.

Thanks for any assistance!!
 

cjmnews

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I played with this for a while, I can't get the problem to reproduce.

Granted I was playing with year fields, but you said those were being altered like the genres.

I updated 3 songs to have the release year of the track, not the release year of the album it came from.

I went to the store and looked at my purchases.
Then back to my songs, no change.
I went to the store where my purchases are and told iTunes to play the song from the purchases in the store, no change to the year.
I found that one of the 3 songs was not on my iPhone, used the cloud to download the song, played it, sync'd to my iTunes and found no change to the year.

Can you document precise steps you follow to see the issue occur?
Are you deleting the song from your iTunes and downloading it again? That would do it.
Outside of that I can't find a scenario that iTunes changes the values in my library.

In my iTunes Preferences I do have 2 things turned off that could be the reason I am not seeing this.
Automatically Download Album Artwork
Share details about your library with Apple.

I have found in the past that album art I find elsewhere is better than Apple's and I like to have it embedded into each song.

I also don't think they need the details (artist images, album covers and related information) from my library to give me purchase suggestions as it is a shared library of 3 very different people, and I can't imagine the suggestions being at all helpful.
 

mightyepop

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Hi CJM, thanks for replying,

I am not deleting or redownloading the songs in any way. This is what happens:

1. I visit the iTunes store
2. Afterwards, when I look at the songs in iTunes, the genres are changed. What I mean by this is when I look at the list of songs, the listed genre is changed to the original genre.
3. As I said, when I look at the properties of each individual song (via Get Info), the information I entered is there, and after I close the song properties, the corrected genre appears in the list. But this means I have to Get Info on each and every song in my Purchased list.
4. This does not affect songs I have imported from CDs or record albums.

This is something I have Googled in the past (last time was about six months ago). I've seen a lot of posts about it, but very few answers. But it is something I've seen others mention.

I did recently upgrade to iTunes 12. I haven't visited the iTunes store since the upgrade... but since I spent 20 minutes opening the properties of each song, I'm not eager to do it again...

I did check my preferences, and I also had Download Album Artwork and Share Details with Apple turned off. So that isn't it.
 
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mightyepop

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I have just now turned off Genius. I never used that feature anyway, but when I turned it off it said iTunes will no longer send information about my library to Apple. Maybe that will help...
 

cjmnews

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I don't use Genius, never have.

I tried mucking with genres too. No change there either. I found some albums I own that are no longer in the store though...but my changes stay in the Purchased playlist, the genres stay, the years stay...

I change genres too, especially audio books.
 

GregMac1213

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I had a similar problem a while back. iTunes would randomly reset the genre, year, and play count of multiple tracks at random. One time, it affected over 100 tracks in a single night. I turned off the option to Show iTunes in the Cloud Purchases (Preferences > Store), and the problem has not recurred. Now, I won't touch that option for anything.
 

cjmnews

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I should try turning that back on to reproduce the issue. But I really doubt it would have an impact other than the cloud versions would not have your updates on the genre, year etc.

I didn't like seeing 2 copies of these files, so I turned it off.
 

GregMac1213

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I should try turning that back on to reproduce the issue. But I really doubt it would have an impact other than the cloud versions would not have your updates on the genre, year etc.

I didn't like seeing 2 copies of these files, so I turned it off.
It won't happen immediately. I'm not sure what exactly triggers it to happen, if anything. But that setting is the root cause. After the first few times of about 40-50 tracks being mysteriously reset, I turned that option off (per a suggestion on the Apple Support Forums) and all was well for a few weeks. Then out of curiosity, I turned it back on and within a day or two got hit with about 140 reset tracks.

I'm sort of surprised (not really) that Apple hasn't fixed it yet. It's been a while since I turned it off permanently because of this issue.
 

Gadzooks

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I also have this problem now after rebuilding my pc with Windows 7 and putting iTunes 11 on it. I just noticed recently that some of the album title that I had renamed (for example, a song downloaded from iTunes from a Greatest Hits, I had changed to the original album title, and changed the year and sometimes the track number to match the original release). I had turned off iCloud, but not before a whole bunch of my tag info had been update. I also checked my iPod touch and it has been updated and I have also exported playlists and they show the updated tag info.

Instead of correcting each tag, I am considering reloading an older itl file in the library with all the changes I had made to the tags. ( I will then need to add again any new tunes I have added since that version of the itl File).

There have been a couple of strange things happening, as one song the genre from iTunes was Country, and I had changed it to Pop, and when I opened the Get Info it changed automatically from Country back to Pop again! I am wondering if this has to do with the way iTunes stores the tag info in its database and it is also stored in the M4a file. Unusual though.

Can anyone tell me what happens when you Right-Click on a song and select "Apply Sort Field". There are "All Matching Fields, Same Album, Same Artist, Same Album Artist, Same Composer, Same Show". For example, if I click on Same Album, I get a dialog box that says "Are you sure you want to change the sort album of all tracks that match the selected tracks - Only tracks that have the same album as the selected tracks will be modified".

I am wondering also if I should change the sort fields in Get Info to match my edited album names, genres, years, etc. or if I should leave the sort fields alone.
 

cjmnews

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Using the ITL file that had it correct should help. Though I am surprised that you are seeing this with M4A files. Usually the tags are updated in M4A files when you save the Get Info changes. The only possible explanation I can imagine is if you had 2 systems sharing the same files and 2 iTunes databases. That could confuse things a bit if you changed Genre on 1 but not the other.

As for the Apply Sort Field, you are changing the way that album sorts, for example if you have an album with Taylor Swift featuring Kanye West for every track, and you want this album to sort by Kanye West, you would update the Artist Sort field to have Kanye West, then apply the Sort Artist it will show Taylor Swift featuring Kanye West, but be sorted as if it said Kanye West as the only artist.

I personally leave the Sort Fields alone, I just update the tags directly.
 

Gadzooks

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OK great thanks. I don't remember ever changing the sort fields so I'll just leave them. I'll be looking at loading one of my older itl files soon. I have another problem that I don't remember seeing before upgrading, and that is that iTunes is displaying tracks from the same CDs by the same artist, each track in its own separate grouping with the same album art for each. I hope the old itl will clear it up or I may post a picture of what I'm talking about here.
 

cjmnews

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That is usually caused by mixed Compilation and not compilation tags. Though it can also be caused by slight differences in the Album or Artist fields (spaces, punctuation, etc.)
 

lancando

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Here's the fix.

Under Edit>Preferences>Store uncheck Sync playback information across devices. Uncheck the check box. Voila! iTunes stops messing with you.
 

cjmnews

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Actually that setting is meant for syncing playback position for podcasts. You can use it in conjunction with Sync Podcast subscriptions and settings to enable all devices with network connections to stay in sync with podcasts.

Details are shown on Apple's page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204207
 

Gadzooks

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I had found a solution to this my apologies for not replying as it took me a while to figure out how to fix it. I don't think you can keep your own tags if you use iCloud though.

I kept loading older and older itls as I keep a running backup of them and noticed that sometimes the itls were changing by themselves. I went to Edit->Prefereces-> and unchecked "show iTunes in the cloud purchases".i had to fight with it as every time I opened an old itl that would be checked again, and the files would start updating while I went into Edit ->Preferences to uncheck it. I finally disconnected from the Internet so it couldn't access the store or cloud andi could uncheck the " show iTunes in the cloud purchases". It's been fine since. You probably won't be able to keep your own custom tags for m4as that you have bought in the store if you want to use iCloud, unless someone knows how to "hardware" the tags
 
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