Open Radar

 
Summary:

When a metadata change is made that should affect whether the artist text below each track in Expanded View is written out explicitly or hidden and implied to be the same as the album artist (I assume the intended behaviour is that when the artist information for at least one track differs from the album-artist, the long format should be displayed, but is otherwise omitted), the visibility of the artist text does not change. An example of such a change would be changing the artist text from "D'Angelo" to "D'Angelo / Method Man / Redman" where the unifying album artist is "D'Angelo". Note that the metadata is correctly recorded in the library, that the per-track artist text, if visible, correctly reflects changes, and that changes to the album-artist correctly trigger an interface update.

The problem persists as long as iTunes is running. After relaunching iTunes, Expanded View will display the album correctly. Changing the visible contents of Expanded View by selecting another album or deselecting all albums and then revisiting the incorrectly-displayed album is not interchangeable with a relaunch.


Steps to Reproduce:

1. Find or prepare an album with artist and album-artist metadata set to exactly the same value for all tracks.
2. Open the album in Expanded View.
3. Right-click a track and choose "Get Info" from the contextual menu, or select a track and press command-I.
4. Change the artist for the track and choose "OK" or press return.


Expected Results:

Because the album can no longer be correctly displayed while omitting the per-track artist information, it should be shown. (Showing it only for tracks where the artist differs from the unifying album-artist should be considered, because it would remove lots of visual clutter in many cases and be harmless in the rest.)


Actual Results:

The per-track artist information is not shown.


Regression:

As far as I know, the issue has existed since Expanded View shipped with iTunes 11.


Notes:

Note that the example given for reproduction could also have called for the per-track artist information to be hidden, rather than shown, where the actual result would instead be that the album displays redundant artist information below every track.