iTunes Changes Customized Genres On It's Own

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Hi there,

My brother, who is not very computer literate, is having some issues with his iTunes library and I can't figure out why this is occurring. I have googled this and seen others are having similar issues, but I can't find an answer. Hoping someone here can help.

First I should say my brother has a large music collection. Probably 75 gig+ by now. I would guess that 60% of his library is iTunes purchases, 30% is imported from CD's, and 10% is from other sources such as Bandcamp etc.

I don't think this would be relevant, but just in case I will say that he does not pirate music. There is nothing pirated on his machine.

This is the problem...

He arranges his library by genre. He also makes several custom genres. He will get everything arranged the way he likes it, and life will go along fantastic for several weeks. Then one day he will turn on his computer and several albums (often 50+) have changed their genres and/or re-arranged themselves.

He sync's his library with just 1 iPod classic. He has an iPhone also but does not sync music to it.

It does appear that this is only happening to music purchased in iTunes. He can't find an example of this happening to a song obtained through other means. So my original assumption that this could be a Gracenote issue isn't likely.

His software, both OS X and iTunes is current and up to date.

Any ideas/solutions? Thanks in advance!
 

chscag

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There may be something going on that I'm not aware of, but I have customized genres that I have used for years throughout various updates of iTunes and have never run into that. I don't have near the extensive library that your brother has though.

You didn't say if it was just the customized genres that were changing or was it others also?
 
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You didn't say if it was just the customized genres that were changing or was it others also?

We hadn't considered that until you mentioned it. We took a look and from what we see it is only songs he's moved into a custom genre that get moved.

At this point it looks like any song purchased through iTunes, which has it's genre changed to one of my brother's custom genres, is at risk of being changed back at some point.
 

Slydude

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Is he using any of the Music Match/iCloud music features? Since it is happening for songs that came from iTunes I wonder if that is resetting the tag information somehow
 
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Thanks to everyone that replied. I think the problem has been solved. He had his "display icloud purchases" turned on. He's not familiar with icloud really and I think he was changing the id tags on the cloud stuff and not the files on his hard drive.
 

Slydude

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When I mentioned iCloud possibly being the problem I wasn't thinking of that as a possibility exactly. I was thinking iCloud might be overwriting the tags on the files that were stored locally. Never dawned on me that he might be editing the wrong tags. I'll keep that in mind if I ever decide to have iTunes show the cloud info.

Glad that worked out.
 
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It's hard for me to know if that was the exact problem or not. But I can't come up with anything else that fits.

I help him remotely and it's difficult because he really doesn't know what he's doing. When he describes things I have to try and discern what he really means.
 

Slydude

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You may well be on the right track. That sounds like a reasonable explanation of what is happening. And of course it's not something he would necessarily think of mentioning even if he were aware of the differences between cloud tracks and tracks on the local library.
 

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