Correcting Artist, Album and Song Info In the Mac Music App

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's learn how to manually set the information for your songs in the Music Library. 

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So maybe you've brought your own music into the Music App or you've had some music in there where the information isn't set correctly. The songs aren't grouped into albums right. The artist's name is incorrect or maybe the artwork is missing. You have a lot of control to be able to set exactly how the songs are represented in the Music app or previous to Catalina in iTunes.

So I've got a sample Music Library here in the Music app. I'm not using Apple Music in this case. I have a bunch of albums in here that have songs in them. Now let's go and bring in some fresh new music here. These are music files that don't have any information attached to them. So kind of a worse case scenario. There's no information set for these at all except for the file names in this case. So if I select all of these and I drag and drop them into the app it will import them in. We're in the Albums view here and you can see it created an album for each individual song. Go into that album and we can see it just has that one song in it.

If we look at Artist we don't even see any kind of artist listed on the left that could match all of those. But since we have All Artists selected I could actually go to the bottom and I can see each individual song has its own artist and its own album. Under Songs it makes a little more sense. We can go to the bottom here and see all the songs here and we can see the artist and album names are blank. So as I said this is like the worse case scenario. It's much easier if you do start off with artist or album set. So how do you go about setting this all up.

Well the first thing you want to do is select the song here. Then you want to go to Song and Info, Command i is the keyboard shortcut. Then here you can see for this song I've got the song name and then nothing else set. So I could set artist here. So let's just say the artist is MacMost. Then I also could set an album in here. So I could call this the MacMost Album and hit Okay. Now that one song kind of disappears from the bottom of the list here because now alphabetically it's right here and you can see now the artist and album are now set. If I go to Albums I could see that the MacMost album is here. Under Artist MacMost now appears as an artist but if I select that I only see that one song.

So now if I wanted to have another song in this album I can go to Songs again and let's choose the second one. Then I'll do Command i and I'll set it to the same thing. So you can see there's a little bit of an auto complete there. It's going to make it easier and I've set the artist and album to the same thing. Now you can see under Songs they're grouped together. Under Albums, if I go to the MacMost album, those two songs are both in there. Under Artist if I go to MacMost as an artist you can see the one album and those two songs there. Great! So by simply setting the artist name to the same exact thing and the album name to the same exact thing I get those songs grouped together as an album.

Now I don't want to have to do that for each song individually. Fortunately I don't have to. I can select all of these. So I can select the first one then Shift Click to select the last one selects the entire range. I can do Command i. It will give me this warning because I'm editing information for multiple songs. Imagine if you selected everything by accident and then went in to edit it thinking you were only changing one song. It could be a disaster for your entire library. So that's why it's doing this warning. I'm going to say Don't Ask Me Again about that and edit the items. 

You can see here it looks a little bit different when you're editing things as a group. But anything you set can actually change what's there. As a matter of fact if I go into Artist and I type MacMost, see this green checkmark here, that's saying I'm going to replace the artist for all of the songs selected. If I change the album it's going to be a green checkmark there too saying, alright, I'm changing that. So the two green checkmarks indicate what it is that I'm changing. Now when I hit OK it's going to change it for all of those. Now you can see under Songs all of the songs are now listed together. Under Albums all that stuff at the end is gone because everything is under one album now. Under Artist I can go to that artist and I can see that album there. 

But what if it's not that simple. What if, for instance, the artist name isn't the same for every song. So let's take a song here in this album and I'm going to do Command i and I'm going to say yeah the artist here is actually going to be MacMost featuring and another name. You see this a lot on songs today where the artist has featuring or feat or whatever and I'm going to say OK for that. I'm also going to select another song and say the same thing here. That one's like that. So now what will I get. Well here in the Songs list, I'm sorting by artist, so it's putting those two songs by themselves after this. 

But if I go to Albums and I go to the top level here you can see I now have two albums. Both have the same name but different artists. Which makes sense because you don't want the Music app to group everything together by album name because two artists with the same album name it's going to think it's the same album. If you look under artist now you can see I've got two artists here. But that's not what I want because this is a single album. So how do I group them together?

Well, let's go back into Songs and select all of these again. Do Command i. So there's two things I can do to put these all together. If these truly are different artists, say it's a compilation album. It has various artists associated with it. I can go down here to compilation and check that box. What that will do is it'll say okay the album name is now the most important thing. Even though the artists are different I'm going to group them together. So when I go and look at Albums here you're going to see that there's a new group at the bottom called Compilations and there's that album with all of those songs in it. 

If you look under Artists then you won't actually see the artists there anywhere. Why? Because it's under Compilations. Now, of course, if that artist doesn't have another album in your collection you'll see that album there. But this particular album is going to be under Compilations.

Now this may not be what we want. So let's go back here and select all of these, Command i, turn off Compilations. But instead we're going to set an album artist. Because in this case really the main artist is this one name and we can set it here. If we set it and have an album artist for song that's going to override the artist when sorting by albums. Now I go to Albums and now it's not under Compilations anymore. It is now an album listed under Albums. I go in there and you have all of the songs in there and you have the correct artist name for each one. If you look under Artist you'll see just that one artist, that was the album artist listed, and there's the album there. So there's two different ways to group together songs by different artists in a single album.

There are a few other things you can use here. You also may want to set artwork. Now if I wanted to set artwork for this album one way I could do it is select one song, any song, Command i, and then go to the Artwork tab and then Add Artwork. Click that button or drag and drop into it. Although I think the proper way to do it is select all of the songs in that album, do Command i, and then go to Artwork and then do it there. So let's drag in some artwork here and I'll hit OK. Now if I go to looking at albums I'll see the artwork there. Look at Artist I'll see the artwork there. 

Now there is one other group that you want to pay attention to. You can do this for an individual song or for the entire album like I have all the songs selected. Go to Sorting. So what Sorting does is it will assign a secondary name to have priority in sorting. So, for instance, if this was called The MacMost Album you can see the default is to get rid of The. So it's just going to sort it as M, MacMost Album. However I might want to sort it with The as the first word. I can do the same thing for Artist as well. So I can sort it for that. If I select an individual song and go to Sorting I can also sort the name of the song. So I can remove The or add The or change the name a little bit especially useful if there are a lot of symbols or things in the song, album, or artist name.

Now you may also want to select some other things for the songs in this album. For instance you may want to set a genre. You might want to enter the year. Also you may also want to set Track. So right now they are all sorted in alphabetical order. When you look at the album and go into here and it's just alphabetical order. But I can do it by Track. The easiest way to do that is select all of the songs first, Command i. Then set the of first. So you can say of 10. So set that for all of them Then go to the first one and set that to what you want. So maybe this is track 1. But maybe this one is track 2. You're going to see now it sorts it properly. You can keep doing that with each one to get the order correct. It's just a matter of going through them one by one. You can see it puts numbers next to the track here when it actually has a track number. So I can see the ones I have yet to go without the numbers. 

So there's a lot you can do here to clean up a messy music library. You can go in and change the artist, the albums, the track numbers to get everything right. This is especially useful if you've created your own library by bringing music in from different sources. But it even works if the music came from Apple Music. It still allows you to go in and change this information just for you. You can move songs around. Create compilation albums. Do all sorts of things. It even syncs with your other devices. So a change that you make on your Mac will then show up on say your iPhone or iPad.