Apple Music gains better sorting of alternate albums

How to manage your Apple Music subscription (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

Apple Music has gained a feature that was originally part of Beats Music.
The feature improves how multiple versions of the same album are displayed.
Now they'll appear at the bottom of the screen beneath a header.

Apple Music has gained a new feature, even though it was originally part of the app that it was based on. Now, users will see alternate versions of albums in a new "Other Versions" section of its track list.

The feature was part of Beats Music before Apple bought it to create Apple Music, but it didn't make the jump to the newly designed Apple Music app. Its return is long overdue.

Looks like Apple has brought back one of the best features from Beats Music with Apple Music: Other Versions of the same album.

This section collects remasters, reissues, remixes, demos, deluxe editions, and explicit/clean versions of the same album. 💯 pic.twitter.com/0FrHmxkqsPLooks like Apple has brought back one of the best features from Beats Music with Apple Music: Other Versions of the same album.

This section collects remasters, reissues, remixes, demos, deluxe editions, and explicit/clean versions of the same album. 💯 pic.twitter.com/0FrHmxkqsP— Federico Viticci (@viticci) February 18, 2020 February 18, 2020

Now, anyone viewing an album with multiple versions available will see them listed at the bottom of the track list, hidden in a new "Other Versions" as detailed by MacStories.

That same behavior is now followed by Apple Music. For example, if you view the Death Cab for Cutie artist page in Apple Music, you'll see Transatlanticism as one of the group's albums, but only one version of it so as to prevent unnecessary cluttering of the album list. Open that album, however, and you'll see the Other Versions section containing the Demos and 10th Anniversary versions.

It kinda makes you wonder why it's taken so long to come back, doesn't it?

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.