Sometimes when I have added one of my ripped CD's tracks to Google Play Music, the tracks incorrectly/annoyingly show up in multiple GPM albums.
For example, I ripped my copy of Hank Williams, Jr.'s "Habits Old and New" to MP3 and added it to GPM…where track 1 appeared in the album "Habits Old and New (Digitally Remastered)" and tracks 2-10 appeared in the album "Habits Old and New (Original Classic Hits – Volume 5)".
I do not see any difference in the ripped MP3 files' metadata that would seem to be responsible for this. Nor do I see a way to correct the problem in GPM itself – e.g. by editing album or song info, drag & drop merging etc.
How can I avoid or fix this "album fragmentation" when it occurs in GPM?
Best Answer
Per @JourneymanGeek's comment, I found that I had missed the song-/album-info edit that fixes the problem, which has continued to affect most of my ripped CDs I have added to GPM.
In each pair of fragmented albums, the songs in one of the albums (typically the one with the fewest songs) show a blank artist: as soon as I update the artist to match the other album in the pair (e.g. Hank Williams, Jr.), the pair merges - no more fragmentation.
What's weird is that I then expected to find corresponding blank artists in some of the source
*.mp3files' metadata - i.e. that GPM simply reflected the inconsistent metadata for the files I uploaded; but the files' metadata was consistent and not blank.Why artist gets nuked on a subset of songs I upload for most albums, I do not know; but I am glad to at least have a way to end the annoying double vision in My Music that results.