The situation: you have albums that seems to be properly organized in your Apple Music Library (formerly iTunes) on your Mac, but when you sync to your iPhone, iOS for some reason either splits albums (two or more albums with the same artwork, title, artist, but with different tracks spread across them) and/or labels some albums as Unknown Album. It’s FUCKING MADDENING. You’ve double-checked your meta data to make sure you have the same album title and artist for each track, etc. (if you haven’t, do this part now). You’ve changed the album title to something weird, then renamed it back and did a sync, no change.

I finally found a thread not on Apple’s site that properly explains the issue. It’s posted here on iLounge and it’s brilliantly explained with a super-simple fix. The basic gist is that iTunes/Music has a weird issue when writing between the iTunes database and ID3 tags on MP3 files. The issue doesn’t seem to appear on purchased items or AAC-encoded songs. Here’s the fix:

Set aside a few hours so you can sync your phone uninterrupted. I set my up to run overnight and woke up to no issues.

• Plug in your iPhone, launch Finder and select your phone
• Under the Music tab, uncheck Sync Music…
• Sync your phone.
• Once you’ve confirmed all the music off your phone, then open Music on your MacOS device.
• Make a new Smart Playlist (File / New / Smart Playlist) with this setting
  • Kind / is / MPEG audio file
  • uncheck limit
• Open this new playlist and Select all tracks then hit:
  • File / Convert / Convert / Convert ID3 Tags
  • Check ID3 Tag version and choose v2.4
  • Hit Okay
• Depending on how many MP3 files you have, this could take a few minutes. Once done, sync music back onto your phone.

That’s it. If you add new MP3 files to your library in the future, you might have to do this for the new tracks. Or you know, Apple could update their fucking shitty software.