under song info, itunes displays information about a song including ‘Composer’, but not writer or lyricist. Anyone know how to have it display?
I believe you need to script Picard to merge the Writer, Composer and Lyrist into the Composer field.
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would work… they could be concatenated together I suppose and even have "(writer) " or "( lyricist) " appended to the person’s name as appropriate…
but I was hoping that iTunes would actually just display the tags in the file… 
Haha… Apple following a standard? You’re going to be waiting for a while. 
Hacking a solution to mush all the data into the one field will be the only way to keep iTunes happy.
I knew you’d say that… even if it is Apple’s own standard:
MusicSmart is an app which shows how good it could be:
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I tag all my music for Apple as I use Apple Music/iTunes. I use the following script in Picard and it works:
$setmulti(composer,%composer%)
$setmulti(lyricist,%lyricist%)
$setmulti(writer,%writer%)
$copymerge(composer,writer)
$copymerge(composer,lyricist)
$unset(writer)
$unset(lyricist)
$set(composer,%composer%)
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Thanks! Looks like everything is combined into the Composer tag?
It is. Apple only recognizes composer for all writing credits including writer & lyricist, unfortunately.
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so frustrating - the style guide defines tags for a lot more information!
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Yeah, that seems to be for the labels info directly to Apple Music. But when I go to properties on Apple Music for Windows, it only has a composer field and nothing else.
I’m not just bashing Apple because Apple. I am as confused as you as to why Apple can’t follow a standard they set out themselves.
Their standards tend to get set based on their own software and not interoperability with others. @tigerman325’s script seems the perfect solution.
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Strange.
How do you create your music library for Apple Music/itunes? Do you use rip cds to flac, then tag and then encode to apple land?
yes, I wasn’t being fair. Apologies.
I’m annoyed.
itunes used to be a lot better. I prefer to think of it as the ensh**ification of itunes. We all know that they want to have everyone buy subscriptions to music and not buy anything…
got so disillusioned with the situation last night that I started reviewing ios iphone flac music players… there are even some that work with car play. Musicsmart doesn’t do flac. Where’s the flac version of it?? Musicsmart uses MB, not sure how.
I think its a good workaround. Not a solution. The solution would be a music player that actually displayed the metadata in a music file… musicsmart maybe that player. I haven’t figured out how much of the metadata in the Apple style guide can actually be stored in an apple .m4a file (and how)
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TL;DR: The most iTunes compatible way for M4A files is likely to store all of composer, writer and lyricist as the “composer” tag in Picard. Furthermore multiple values should likely be flattened to a single value instead of being stored as a real multi-value entry. tigerman325’s script above handles this all.
Longer answer:
For M4A Apple had defined a single tag ©wrt, in which Picard stores the “composer”.
For “lyricist” it has a defined mapping to a a custom tag (----:com.apple.iTunes:LYRICIST).
“writer” is not explicitly mapped, which just means it also ends up as a similar custom tag. Don’t know, maybe it should rather map this to ©wrt as well? Would make problems when reading the tags, though.
Anyway, as far as Apple / iTunes is concerned there is only ©wrt unfortunately. To make things worse, iTunes also does not properly support multiple values for MP4 tags and Apple never properly defined how multiple values should be stored or even if this is supposed to be supported.
Which then gives us the situation that iTunes doesn’t support multiple values, and for other tools supporting it there are two completely different ways how to store multiple values in MP4. Both created by interpolating Apple standards in different ways how multiple values would have been supposed to work, if it was actually specified.
There is the way how Picard or rather mutagen ( the tagging library Picard uses) does it, and another approach supported by e.g. MP3tag or foobar2000. To be fair, mutagen seems to be in the minority position here. But the entire situation is a mess.
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You hit the problem right on the head there. Apple have moved away from iTunes to subscriptions to online streaming. Not investing time\money in improving iTunes any more.
I wish you luck in getting a solution. Apple lock things down quite hard, and it is expensive to stick things in the Apple store that leads to less options.
I’ll say this quietly, but there was a point in the last few years I have considered owning an iPhone. But then I looked at the music side and it shocked me as to how closed the options are. You know my experiences from that long thread last year: iPhone music apps - playing YOUR music on the move
Here is a random tangent of a suggestion… carry two phones. Get a cheap Android without a SIM and treat it like an iPod. Plenty of musical options on Android.
Remember how small and convenient an iPod used to be? Now that was the pinnacle of Apple understanding music on the move. 
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