TLDR:
Apple support is useless wrt this problem.
Remove all of your content from match ...
Then go into your iTMS purchases and delete/ hide the ones with that are sorted analphabetically ..
Hey apple if you are reading (and I know you aren't):
Even if you can't actually fix it, you could add a time stamp to match content and it would be a huge help, e.g. on my phone when I toggle match on and off it would tell me the time associated with the last "match" it matched. That way I would be able to discern between "it didn't work / is still broken" and "it might work, but even though I just showed you a load bar i reloaded cached /old metadata"
-----
Here is my narrative and what I was told to do; what worked and what didn't, and what apple themselves told me:
Glad I found this thread. I spent the last week with a scrambled library displaying on my iphone while everything was fine on my mbp. At first it was just artists that were set to display as lastname, firstname displaying as firstname, lastname, despite my confirming that the metadata was correct on my mbp and trying to sync match over and over... I was suspicious because the only artists that were sorting in this erroneous fashion were those I had purchased from the itunes store.
soon things got crazy. A band called "lives of angels" was showing up under the letter A, navigating down, I found several "albums" -- one was the actual lives of angels record ... the rest were songs that had somehow been extracted from their actual records and resorted under "lives of angels" for example, I might have a rolling stones record with ten songs, but one of those songs would show up as a separate record by "lives of angels." At now point was any metadata on my mbp messed up - I even downloaded (and paid $10) for a 3rd party metadata tool just to confirm. This thing happened with other artists too.
A more frequent problem was artists suddenly being split into multiple copies of the same artist. For example, instead of one entry for a band, I'd see two --- again this is in spite of going in and confirming that the metadata was accurate.
What was even stranger was that during this time I discovered that errors would move. That is an artist that might show up twice would stop showing up twice, but a new artist would show up twice at the same time. Or an artist that was showing up at the wrong spot in the alphabet would go away but a new artist would show up in a wrong spot.
I went in and removed any artist that displayed this problem from my itunes library, removing them from itunes match at the same time. I thought updating itunes match would fix this, but I was stuck with a week of an error #4010, which is an itunes match sync error.
I emailed apple support during that time. I got one response, which was "try rebuilding your library." Of course, I had already tried that, as well as everything else I found on an apple support forums thread, which disappeared a few days later. I was able to reload it from google's cache, but as I mistakenly thought my problem was resolved (and was asked by apple to wipe my phone and laptop) I lost the link in the process. At any rate, it offered a variety of suggestion that a user, who I believe had red#5 in his username, was asked to implement before apple conceding that the problem was on their end. At that point he claimed that apple admitted that there was a problem with his cloud partition and was able to dissociate his account from that, effectively wiping it.
At any rate the reason that those steps he went through are not significant is because after a week of inaction I contacted apple and was bounced back and forth between reps. They were all totally nice and professional, they just had no idea how to fix the problem. In the process I wiped my MBP HD and pulled my old content off a backup. To be clear here - just the mp3 files, not the library or anything. I also wiped my phone and set it up as a new iphone with the same #.
I tried adding and removing artists from itunes match in an a la carte fashion, but and that didnt consistently introduce errors. They would come back, or not, but it didn't matter what I did.
At this point, in spite of me deleting all content from match out of desperation, I realized that some music was still showing up "in the cloud." Later I realized that this was all old itunes store purchases. It wasn't all of my itunes purchases, but there wasn't anything there that wasn't from itunes. This content was still sorted incorrectly. I called tech support again.
They told me they were aware of the issue. They had received a "breaking news" or "buzz" about it, but did not have a fix aside from suggesting I sync match, change the names of all artists, sync match again, then correct the names, then sync match again. The example I was given was that another user had changed "stevie wonder" to "stevie wonderboy" then synced match, then changed "stevie wonderboy" back to "stevie wonder" then synced again. I asked if it would be ok if I changed something other than the artist field, genre for example... as I had about 10k songs made up of contributions from 100s of artists and that would take forever. The clueless but friendly response was "I dunnno try it." I mentioned the thread I found earlier - wherein another user had gotten "engineering" to decouple his account from his partition. I was told that wasn't possible. I asked if I could create a new account and the accounts could be merged, I was told that that wasn't possible. The rep basically got me off the phone by saying he'd call me if he found a solution to my problem, and after a day on the phone with apple ( about 5.5 hours of the course of the day tbh) I was too exhausted to fight.
The next day, I realized something... apple is pushing bad metadata.
Now, that is not responsible for 100% of my problem... there is obviously a secondary analphabetical screw up somewhere in the cloud...
but many of the remaining problems, for example, with an artist whos name starts with "S" appearing under "V" between two "various artists", or a record appearing as "various artists & various artists" ... these screw ups were actually baked into the original purchases. Going into my itunes store account and deleting (I guess "hiding") them seemed to my final problems, even though it took forever, and itunes froze at several points. Of course, I kept local copies of the files. As we know, sometimes your matched content will revert to ITMS incorrect, or at least older- metadata, and thats what I think was happening.
Later, I built a new library from my old backed up audio files and updated match. Almost everything was resolved at that point except for one metadata error I found on my end. Of course it took me forever to fix, because in spite of the number of times I updated match, and toggled match on and off and on and off on my phone, it seemed to take its sweet time.
Later today, I found a new split artist. Of course it displays as a single artist within itunes on my mbp, but the artist shows up twice on "music.app" on ios. spent an hour an a half confirming that the metadata was correct > updating match > toggling match on and off on my phone > no results > rinse and repeat. Finally did the blunt instrument of adding a space after the artist name and somehow it finally stuck.
When I think back on my day: I used linux commands to move create and move files in terminal and got an allegedly broken java applet to launch so that I could use another piece of hardware to flash the firmware of an embedded microcontroller. I have a phd from an engineering school. I am not saying I am some 73tt3 haxxor or whatever... but why is it that I can do that **** but cant keep Kraftwerk from showing up twice? Its because yr sh*t is broken, apple.
Also if you guys want to get rid of the weird wrong an random artist pictures (eg right now Match is giving me some black and white picture of a bald man smoking a ciggarette for
nancy sinatra ) check out cesium on the app store, solves a lot of sorting and display problems, but the downside is no playlist creation.
also if anyone knows if this is related to the fact that watching tv shows purchases through itms on my phone results in randomly marking other previously watched content as unwatched, or why hiding purchased apps in the app store does nothing then let me know
apple. the interface *is* the brand. get back to it.
