iPhone Music Sorting/Grouping is broken

January 22, 2012 12:27 PM

Since enabling iTunes in the Cloud, my music is sorted/grouped incorrectly on my iPhone. Albums starting with "S" will appear under "T", for instance. See this image for an example.

Even after disabling iTunes in the Cloud, the problem persists. I've tried synching my phone, to no avail. I'm using an iPhone 4, running iOS 5.0.1

posted by krunk to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Did you try telling iTunes to do a restore on your phone. This is something of a nuclear option because it basically resets your iPhone to its factory-fresh state (so backup your contacts first), but if the sorting thing is some lingering symptom of enabling the cloud services, it will fix the problem.
posted by axiom at 12:51 PM on January 22, 2012

This happened on my iPhone, too; I'm fairly certaing iCloud is a red herring, since I have never used it.

In my case it turned out to be a bug related to the "Group by Album Artist" setting in iOS 5. I turned that off and back on again and it cleared itself up. I can't recall now if I also rebooted the phone or perhaps loaded some new tracks while the setting was off, but you might try that to make sure the Music app notices the change and refreshes itself.
posted by bcwinters at 1:17 PM on January 22, 2012

Response by poster: @bcwinters: thanks, but no joy. @axiom: I haven't tried that yet, but will as a last resort if nothing else works.
posted by krunk at 5:35 PM on January 22, 2012

This happened to me as well after turning on iTunes Match. Additionally, the process ended up maxing out my available space with erroneous duplicates (some hidden). I took the nuclear option, wiped my phone and started my music library from scratch using Match. Long story short, too many persistant errors, I reverted back to the old way of managing my music.

iTunes Match consequently functions primarily as a music upgrade service than an on-demand cloud solution for me.
posted by platosadvocate at 7:00 PM on January 22, 2012

What do you see in the Sort Album Title fields in iTunes? (You should probably check each track separately on at least a couple of the albums you're seeing sorted incorrectly.)
posted by Lazlo at 8:52 PM on January 22, 2012

I had the same issue. It was fixed by restore the phone from a backup.
posted by rickim at 8:01 AM on January 23, 2012