Sigh ... there are so many issues with Music. I've noticed a few cases in Music where they arbitrarily lose one track in an album. Dragging an album in from iTunes to Yate sometimes corrects PIDs that should not have been changed.

Nobody really understands why iTune/Music sometimes splits an album into two or more parts. In my case the 'Extreme' actions fixed these issues.

In your case the best thing might be to remove the entire album from iTunes and to add it back again from Yate.

I've found that when I get a PID not found error if I drag the all the songs from an album into Yate the PIDs are corrected. So much for 'P' meaning Persistent!

Sorry about this. I've reported all these Music issues before Catalina shipped. Not a one has been fixed. Unfortunately the same is true for a few pretty bad system issues.

How did you run the Extreme action? In a Batch Process? Or did you drag in everything from iTunes and run it all at Once? I envisaged it to process an album at a time. However, I just ran it with a bunch of albums loaded in the UI and it worked fine.

If you updated from iTunes to Music did you rune Actions>Batch Extract Persistent IDs to remove the old PIDs that Yate placed in the files?

There is way too much of a discrepancy in the two counts. I'm assuming that you want all the tracks in Music.

Rather than wipe everything we can attempt to fix it in a three step process.

1) run your files through the Batch Processor with an action which removes all the existing PIDs.

2) on the Actions menu run the Batch Extract Persistent IDs function. This will make sure that all the PIDs in the tracks already in Music are placed correctly in the files.

3) run your files through the Batch Processor adding whatever tracks do not have a PID.

If you want to go down this route let me know and I'll send you the two small actions.

Download the following file:

https://2manyrobots.com/actions/CleanAppleAppLinkage.zip

- unzip the file.
- drag the unzipped plist file into the Yate main window's file list area. If you look at the Action Manager you should have the following folder and actions:

Folder: Clean Apple App Linkage
Remove All PIDs
Add Files without PIDs

Before you proceed I recommend the following Preferences - Apple Apps settings.

On the General tab, check Prefer PIDs when linking.
On the Auto Import tab make sure Persistent ID is checked.

Step 1:

- on the Actions menu select the Batch Processor Wizard process
- if this is the first time you're running the Batch Processor you may get a few warning panels. You can dismiss them.
- from the drop down control select the Remove All PIDs action in the Clean Apple App Linkage folder.
- hit Next
- drag the root folder of your collection to the target image
- hit Next
- make sure that Auto save files is checked.
- Verbose log does not have to be checked.
- hit Start
- when the process finishes have a quick look at the log file to see if you had any errors.

The above step removed any PID information in the files.

Step 2:

- On the Actions menu select Batch Extract Persistent IDs
- make sure Log only is not checked
- Verbose log does not have to be checked. You are only interested in errors.
- if you don't want to mess around with video files ... select Music from the drop down control
- hit Start
- when the process finishes have a quick look at the log file to see if you had any errors.

The above step will extract all PIDs from Music and write them to the files.

Step 3:

- on the Actions menu select the Batch Processor Wizard process
- from the drop down control select the Add Files without PIDs action in the Clean Apple App Linkage folder.
- hit Next
- drag the root folder of your collection to the target image
- hit Next
- make sure that Auto save files is checked.
- Verbose log does not have to be checked.
- hit Start
- when the process finishes have a quick look at the log file to see if you had any errors.

If everything went okay, all your tracks should now be in Music. This is basically the process I ran when I moved from iTunes to Music.

Great 🙂

So Music was okay and you rebooted and now Music is missing tracks? I think I mentioned that Music occasionally seems to lose track 1 in albums. I haven't been able to confirm this or make it happen with any degree of regularity. I've mentioned this many times but Music has tons of issues. I haven't been hearing about this so I would hope that the issue is not all that pervasive.

I'd reboot a few times and see if anything changes. BTW was Music open when you rebooted? This may be a no-no. It seems to me that they do a lazy save of the flat file database.

Honestly, the best way to make things right is to run the process you already did. If files are missing in Music the actual files still contain the now invalid PIDs.

I don't know what else I can tell you. Music may be pretty but iTunes worked far better. If it seems stable after rebooting a few times, try the process again. Then let Music settle down then close it. Don't reboot for a while 🙂 The only other way to do it is to run a batch process to try linking every file and adding those that can't be linked. This is somewhat faster but more worrisome as all we will know is that a PID is bad ... not that the file is actually missing. This is doubtful but possible,

The errors flagged by AFHC may be benign. Yate didn't create the 'Encoding Params ' UDTI. You can check what's in the field by going to Preferences-Audio-General and enable Verbose log raw data. Set the limit to 500. If you select the file you can do a View>Raw Data. Reading an m4a tree is not trivial. However, at some point you'll see the raw data for 'Encoding Params'. Have a look and you'll see what's in there. More than likely these errors preexisted. If you have issues reading the log save it and email it to us (support@2manyrobots.com). If you load one of these files into Yate you can remove the errors via an action or from the Multi Field Editor. Set the MFE as in the attached image and click on Trim Fields.