Merging Artists
Libraries accumulate duplicate artists. One album tags the band as “The Beatles”, another as “Beatles”; a Plex import writes “Beyoncé” where a local file says “Beyonce”; a single gets filed under “Artist & Guest” instead of “Artist”. You end up with two cards for one act and each one only knows about half the music.
Merging tells Homecrate that one artist name is really the same act as another, so they browse and play as one.
Merging Two Artists
- Go to the Artist tab in the Library filter row
- Long-press the artist card you want to fold away — the duplicate, not the one you’re keeping
- Tap the purple Merge chip
[SCREENSHOT: Artist card long-pressed — Delete, Merge, Up Next, Omit, Reset and Cancel chips]
The Merge Artist sheet opens.
[SCREENSHOT: Merge Artist sheet — explanation card and Select Parent Artist list]
- Under Select Parent Artist, tap the name you want to keep — the selected row highlights in purple with a checkmark
- Tap Merge Artists
The Merge Artists button stays dimmed and inert until you’ve picked a parent.
Which Artist Goes Where
The direction matters, and the sheet is explicit about it:
Merge X into another artist. This will hide X from the artist grid, but all tracks will appear under the parent artist.
- The artist you long-pressed is the child. It disappears from the Artists grid.
- The artist you select in the sheet is the parent. It absorbs the child’s music.
So long-press the spelling you want to get rid of, and select the spelling you want to keep.
The parent list contains every other artist currently visible in your Artists grid. The artist being merged is excluded from its own list, and artists that have already been merged into someone else aren’t offered as parents.
What Changes After a Merge
| Where | Effect |
|---|---|
| Artists grid | The child card is gone; only the parent remains |
| Artist Focus modal (parent) | Albums, Songs and counts now include the child’s tracks — see Artists |
| Shuffle All / Set Up Next on the parent | Pulls from the combined catalogue |
| Up Next artist browser | Shows the merged view |
| Apple Watch library snapshot | Shows the merged view |
| All Tracks view | Unchanged — rows still show each track’s original artist text |
| Albums view | Unchanged — album cards keep their own album-artist line |
A merge is a piece of browsing metadata, not a rewrite. Nothing is written to your audio files and no track’s stored artist name changes, which is why the original spellings still show up on individual rows.
Limits Worth Knowing
Merging can’t be undone from the app. There’s no unmerge button. Check the direction before you tap Merge Artists.
One parent per artist. An artist can only be merged into a single parent. Merging the same artist again simply replaces the previous parent — the old pairing is dropped.
Merges are one level deep. If you merge A into B and then B into C, opening C gives you C plus B, but not A. When you have three or more spellings of the same act, merge every one of them directly into the single name you’re keeping rather than chaining them.
Listening analytics stay separate. Play counts, skips and listening time are recorded against the artist name stored on each track, and merges aren’t consulted there — so the two spellings keep their own stats in the analytics dashboard.
AI features still see both names. Library AI builds its picture of your library from the raw artist names on your tracks, so a merged child can still turn up as its own artist in generated playlists and answers.
Merging vs. Automatic Canonicalization
Homecrate already tries to prevent duplicates at import time, which is why you shouldn’t need to merge often.
When a new track is imported, its artist name is compared against the artists already in your library. If it looks like a variant of one of them, the incoming name is rewritten to whichever existing spelling has the most tracks — so fresh imports settle into whatever convention your library already uses. See Importing Music.
The comparison ignores differences that shouldn’t matter:
| Ignored difference | Example |
|---|---|
| Capitalisation | THE CLASH / The Clash |
| Accents and diacritics | Beyoncé / Beyonce |
| A leading “The” | The Beatles / Beatles |
& versus and | Hall & Oates / Hall and Oates |
| Punctuation and extra spaces | A.C. Newman / AC Newman |
It also strips a trailing collaboration phrase — &, and, ft., feat., featuring, with, vs, x, presents — so “Artist feat. Guest” is recognised as the same act as “Artist”.
Plain word containment is deliberately not treated as a match: “Drake” is a substring of “Drake Bell”, but they’re different people. That’s the kind of case manual merging exists for.
Two things this doesn’t cover, which is where merging comes in:
- Existing tracks are never rewritten. Canonicalization applies to new imports only, so duplicates already in your library stay duplicated until you merge them.
- Genuinely different spellings. Nicknames, abbreviations and alternate transliterations (“CCR” and “Creedence Clearwater Revival”) share no normalized form, so only a manual merge joins them.
Cleaning Up an Artist Grid
A practical pass over a messy library:
- Switch to the Artist tab and scroll the grid looking for near-duplicate names sitting next to each other — the grid is sorted alphabetically, so variants usually land together
- Decide which spelling is the keeper (normally the one with the most albums)
- Long-press each of the others in turn and merge it directly into the keeper
- Open the keeper’s Artist Focus modal and confirm the album count looks right
If a name turns out to be a genuinely different artist rather than a variant, leave it alone — and remember that if you merge it by mistake, there’s no way back from the UI.