Help! iTunes library – if I want to look at my library organised by artist I get multiple entries for certain artists – it seems to that certain albums/tracks as being by different artist even though I’ve tried just copying and pasting the artist name to avoid any silly mistakes re spacing etc – for does it seem to have anything to dos with file type, genre or anything else I can think of. It works fine under the other hearings, it’s just under ‘artist’ it goes crazy – and when I want to browse by artist through the Apple TV certain albums don’t show up at all. It is infuriating. can anyone help?
Aaaagh iTunes!
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Try playing around a bit with the “album artist” section. Eliminate it from all the artist’s songs. Then apply it again. And maybe repeat. Seems to work for me. Dunno why.
Holy cow! I’ve been trying to fix that for about a year now – nothing on any of the Apple forums worked, but you did it! I don’t understand why – I thought I’d tried every variation but deleting the ‘album artist’ then reinserting it fixed it. We are eternally grateful! I do try to use the system outlined by the Count, below, i.e. Prince as the album artist then Prince &the Revolution etc as the artist – trouble is I can never remember which way round it’s supposed to be. That can’t be how the problem arose though – cos with Bowie it’s all just ‘David Bowie” for both ‘artist’ and ‘album artist’ (except for the sole Tin Machine album) and I still ended up with 16 different artist categories for Bowie. But it’s all fixed now! Thank you!
You’re very welcome, Mick. Glad to hear it worked.
I’ve also found that setting the sort fields for both artist and album artist helps too, particularly after combining two or more CDs from a multi-disc set into one album.
It also has the added benefit of sorting acts into the proper order – i.e. by last name!
I have a few tricks to try to repair the damage iTunes does to a perfectly well imported album but a few times I’ve just given up, deleted it and re loaded it. Fine, until iTunes splits it up again……
I usually make the ‘album artist’ field consistent. For example, Elvis Costello. I have all his albums with ‘Elvis Costello’ as ‘album artist’, then under ‘artist’, I put whatever the album is credited to i.e. ‘Elvis Costello & The Attractions’, ‘The Costello Show’ etc. This means that all the albums will be gathered in one folder and all appear as single entries on the iPod.
If there are guest artists on certain tracks, I usually tag the details of the guests on the song title.
If you leave ‘album artist’ blank, iTunes will use the ‘album’ field.
I’ve recently had a weird problem with my Windows Media Player.
When I rip new albums to my WMP, I always add them to a 2016 playlist as well (partly because the “Recently Added” function has disappeared on Windows 10, and also because it helps me when I do my “Best of 2016” CDs for Christmas).
But I’ve noticed that if any of the tracks on an album added to a playlist has the same title as another track by another artist on another album already in my WMP, the track I’m adding to the playlist is replaced with that other track by the same name!
So every time I’ve added a new album to it I have to check if any track has been replaced in the playlist; remove the wrong track and add the actual track I wanted again, and then it stays in! Truly strange, and a bunch of extra work for no good reason.
I never realised before how many different songs that share a title there is!