Oh, Apple. How do you manage to take something that works and break it in such wonderful ways?
The other day I went for a run and decided to listen to the Jon and Vangelis album The Friends of Mr. Cairo. I had previously downloaded it from Apple Music onto my iPhone (the downloaded part is important–this saves me bandwidth because I don’t need to stream the music over cell while I’m out running). I had listened to the album on runs before, and had no issues.
This time I noticed something different.
The previous night, I had added two other Jon and Vangelis albums on my Mac–added, but not downloaded. These were faithfully reproduced (but not downloaded–as expected) on my iPhone’s Music app. All good so far.
Except the first song, “I’ll Find My Way Home” was no longer part of The Friends of Mr. Cairo. It was now part of another album, but only listed by itself. The two albums are:
- The Friends of Mr. Cairo (Remastered) — the one that previously had all the songs from the album, but was now missing “I’ll Find My Way Home”
- The Friends of Mr. Cairo (2016 Remaster) — which only has “I’ll Find My Way Home” and nothing else
Yes, by adding these other albums, the Apple Music app apparently tried to fix something that was not broken and now has split the single album across two separate albums, apparently pulling from two different versions or just two of the same but with slightly different names. For my run, I had to create a playlist just to play the actual album in order. I guess that helped warm up my fingers. I named the playlist in a crude, but I think fair, manner:
To fix this I had to delete both copies from my iPhone, then download the 2016 remaster, except the first time it only grabbed one song (this isn’t even the downloaded part, just getting the actual list of songs), the second time it grabbed two and the third time, by some miracle, it grabbed all seven tracks and downloaded them without setting my phone on fire.
Now to see if this actually stays in place or if Apple’s secret and evil gnome magic will start splitting it up into multiple albums again.
I could have been eating a cookie instead of doing all this. A yummy cookie.
Bad Apple.
