iTunes shows lots of albums for the same one!!

Big-Mac-Please · 30 Nov 2012 at 18:49

Hello,

How do I stop iTunes showing lots of albums for the same one? It seems to show a cover for each flipping person the artist features with and it annoys the nuts off me!!

So is there a way to get it to show one cover for one album like it does for all the TV shows, one cover for one series!

Thanks!

miikeeyy92 · 30 Nov 2012 at 18:57

Set the album artist to the same one, then have the featured artist in the artist of the song only.

Big-Mac-Please · 30 Nov 2012 at 18:58

Come again?

Hows that done?

miikeeyy92 · 30 Nov 2012 at 19:02

Set the 'album artist' for that album to exactly the same artist for each song i.e. Chase & status, then if a particular song is featuring someone, then only have that featured artist in that particular songs 'artist' section. All done via the 'get info' option in iTunes.

AshD93 · 30 Nov 2012 at 21:02

Or set them as a compilation by highlighted all affected tracks and get info, then the last tab if I recall correctly.

Big-Mac-Please · 1 Dec 2012 at 15:00

Well this has gone completely pete tong and destroyed my entire music collection!!!

I changed one group of files album name and it changed them all!! So I spent hours changing them back one by one and it still didnt do it right!!

Not sure if I've found a bug there but now I will have to star again and loose years worth of play counts, ratings, everything!!

rctneil · 1 Dec 2012 at 18:28

If you have an album like a Now That's What I Call Music album where each track is by a different artist then you need to give all tracks a single ALBUM artist.

So select them all, change the ALBUM ARTIST to Various Artists and save it. That will make the album appear as one and it will contain multiple tracks by each individual artist.

If all the tracks on a particular album are by the same artist then you can safely ignore the album artists field but if not then that is the point and main use of it.

Neil

Hybridtheory · 7 Dec 2012 at 00:18

or change the view to sort by album instead of artist ?

memyselfandi · 7 Dec 2012 at 04:17

Hybridtheory said:
or change the view to sort by album instead of artist ?

No, the problem is that iTunes displays tracks by different artists on the same album as separate albums so doing that will not help. As has been said there are two possible fixes for this:

1. Select all the albums which are supposed to actually be a single album and set a common album artist, for example Various Artists. ITunes then realises that as the album name and the album artist are now the same that it is the same album and hence combines things together despite the track artists being different.

2. Select all the albums which are supposed to actually be a single album and again do a right click -> get info but this time go to the last tab and set the compilation option which should then combine them together.

Both these assume the the album name is exactly the same in each case.

StevenG · 9 Dec 2012 at 20:28

rctneil said:
So select them all, change the ALBUM ARTIST to Various Artists and save it. That will make the album appear as one and it will contain multiple tracks by each individual artist.

If all the tracks on a particular album are by the same artist then you can safely ignore the album artists field but if not then that is the point and main use of it.

Neil

Quoted as this is exactly what i do.

Tip: If your importing the music into iTunes then make a Playlist first, drag each disk into the playlist and then highlight all. change Album artist etc and then remove from playlist and they should all import correctly.