Apple's Music and Split Albums

For a long time Apple's Music app (and before that iTunes) has introduced crazy splits of Albums. One thinks one has one album, like Mozart's String Quintets with Cecil Aronowitz and the Amadeus Quartet. However, the Music app splits the album into two, with the tracks spread seemingly randomly between them.

The same album split into two by Apple's engineers.

For an almost equally long time, my solution has not included any trust in Apple, who has not shown any interest in fixing the problem. Instead, I have added all the songs of the "two" albums into one "Playlist," which I have played like an album.

However, when there are too many song tracks scattered too randomly between the two ghost albums, it is very difficult to make sure that everything gets to the right place in the right order. I recently found a somewhat reliable way of doing it semi-automatically.

1. Click on one of the two icons for the album. 
2. Scroll to the bottom of the list and check if there is a link called Show Complete Album. (See illustration below.) If there is such a link skip the steps 3-5 and go to direct to 6. 
3. Check different views (albums, downloaded...) to see if the link is there.
4. Click on one or several items and remove them from the downloaded songs.
5. Repeat until you see the link, or until you decide that life is too short for this kind of exercises. But be patient and take your time and wait. Something is probably updating in the background.
6. Click on the link Show Complete Album. Surprisingly, this view contains all the tracks from both ghost albums.
7. Click on the red circle with three white dots to get a context menu for the album. 
8. Click on "Add to a Playlist". Give the playlist a good name, and from now on use the Playlist instead of the broken Album icons. 

Click on the red link!

Enjoy your music!