Why doesn't my iPod library match my iTunes?

July 9, 2007 8:54 AM

Please help with a strange iTunes 7.3 problem - Library and synced iPod aren't "matching up"!

I have only full albums on my iPod, but I like having recently added and favorite albums at the top of my artist list. I did this by prefixing certain artist names with "!" which would make them appear at the top of the list. After doing this for a good 2 years, all of a sudden the exclamation point would no longer sort on top, once I updated to iTunes 7.3.

Since it was silly to have artists prefixed with an "!" without doing anything, I changed all those artist back to normal. But now, even though my local iTunes library looks fine, the exclamation points remain on some artist on the iPod even after restoring and re-syncing the entire library to the iPod!

So for example, I have three Dizzee Rascal albums, one of which had the artist prefixed with "!". Now on my iPod I'm showing three artists:

Dizzee Rascal
! Dizzee Rascal
Dizzee Rascal

I also have a few artists where there are three copies of the same artist, even though I've re-tagged them in my library. Example:

Four Tet
Four Tet
Four Tet

My google-fu has failed, as I'm not really sure what I actually should be searching for here.

posted by Ekim Neems to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Not sure what to do about the exclamation mark problem, but for the actual artists.... try highlighting all of the same artist in the library and renaming them en masse. The iPod will distinguish between names that have different numbers of spaces after the name, too. So Four Tet space will be different from Four Tet.

Hope that helps?
posted by Phire at 9:09 AM on July 9, 2007

I actually just noticed this problem last week on my iPod as well. I did a hard restore, but when I resync'd, had the same problem.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:36 AM on July 9, 2007

Phire, at least in my case, it's not a problem with spaces or slightly different characters. The duplicate artist names are true duplicates, with the same tracks listed under each.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:37 AM on July 9, 2007

Response by poster: Ditto for me as well. I've checked that there are no extraneous characters.
posted by Ekim Neems at 9:50 AM on July 9, 2007

I would suggest reverting back to 7.2 if possible. It seems 7.3 made various changes to the way files are sorted. I upgraded earlier today and have been have been unable to sort podcasts in any manner. Which would be fine, but iTunes automatically moved some of them out of alphabetical order which drives me nuts. See this thread for more.
posted by dustinAFN at 10:12 AM on July 9, 2007

Response by poster: The problem is that I have an iPhone, so I will need 7.3 to be able to sync with my iPhone.
posted by Ekim Neems at 10:17 AM on July 9, 2007

It seems 7.3 made various changes to the way files are sorted

Yup. 7.3 sorts letters first, then special characters. For three years, I had Big Star's #1 Record as the first record in my library, then once I installed 7.3 it vanished and I thought iTunes ate it. But it sorts "special characters" after the alphabet, for some screwy reason.

To replicate your old sorts, start all the records you want as favorites with 'aaa' or something, like "aaaBig Star", which should sort them back to the top for you.
posted by pdb at 10:28 AM on July 9, 2007

You can actually set iTunes to sort by "date added" you know. That way all your newly added songs will be at the top of the list. Your favourite artists wont be though, but thats what rating and smart playlists are for.
posted by gergtreble at 2:22 PM on July 9, 2007

So, it turns out that 7.3 actually added access to an additional field in the tag: "sort name." And for some reason, the sort names for the same artist, even within the same album, were not initially consistent in my library. If you have an artist with two sort names, their albums will show up twice on the iPod. After wading through and correcting them, everything sorts fine.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:30 AM on October 14, 2007