Led-Zeppelin wrote:
I still blame the itunes programming LOL :)
That thought may be adversely affecting your progress.
The Album Artist field (box):
It is there. If you edit a song in iTunes, the Album Artist field will be shown. Please post a screenshot of an example of where is it is not visible (and please state which format the song is in). Let's look again at the album by Nelly Furtado, that features guest artists on four of the thirteen songs. Below is a screenshot in Songs View, showing the Artist column, the Album Artist column and...
Oh! When you say that the Album Artist is not visible, do you mean in the Songs view shown below, which shows the Album Artist column?
If this is the problem, say so. If not - and you're referring to the edit views; when you edit a song, you will see the Album Artist field as a box, on the Details tab, as shown below:
Your #16 song:
I have an album by one/same artist with 16 songs on it. 15 of the songs by the same artist, but one song (#16) is with that artist and another artist. When show CD album info screen showed up, artist name was the name of that one/same artist (there is no "album artist" field in that screen, only "artist").
Please provide a screenshot of your example of the missing Album Artist field. It's the only way to clear up this particular point, one way or another.
To keep the album together in your iTunes Library, the song Edit Info panel must have the Album Artist field completed with the name of the prime artist (Nelly Furtado in the example above), while the Artist field must have the name of the main artist and the featured one (Nelly Furtado feat. Juanes). All the songs on that album must have the Album Artist field completed with the exact same text. Use copy-and-paste if necessary.
The next thing is to clear up the mention of the word "folder":
as far as I'm concerned, there is only one use of the word "folder" in iTunes and that's a Playlist Folder:
Whenever anyone uses the word "folder", my concern is that they are referring to (and changing) folder names in Windows Explorer. If that's what you're doing, I strongly recommend that you don't as it will simply cause iTunes to lose track of songs. iTunes will create folders in Windows file system, that's its job. Let it do so; that's how it manages so successfully. If you try to fight it, it's a recipe for disaster.
The place to edit music is inside your iTunes Library:
iTunes is set to ignore "The" (and the "A") in band names and in song titles when sorting. It still shows "The", it just doesn't sort on it:
In the example above, note that the main display shows The Age / The Last ..., but the sorting field removes "The". iTunes does this on your behalf.
Here is a screenshot of the album list, showing both both the album and single entries for The Age Of Understatement, which you can see are listed in correct alphabetical order, between Age Of Loneliness and Ah Feel Like Ahcid:
Note that when you make tag changes in iTunes, the tags for the songs are edited in the files, but the Windows folder name is not.
My expectation was: itunes creates one album folder/entry under the name of the album name for that one artist. What actually happened: itunes created 2 albums: it created one album for the 15 songs under that one/same artist PLUS another folder under the name of that artist with the other artist for song #16.
Yes, and that happened to me with the Nelly Furtado album:
I can't recall whether the Nelly album was my oversight, or simply iTunes being efficient, ... but so what?
You have a choice. Either:
- accept that this is what iTunes does sometimes (especially if you didn't take the appropriate action to prevent it), understand it and thereby instinctively know where to find files for songs - if you ever need them - or
- move files around in Windows Explorer, to put them all in one folder - after you've added the songs to your iTunes Library, help iTunes re-locate the files for those songs when it loses track of the files (which it will do if you move or edit in Windows Explorer), get annoyed by the process...
Your choice. It may seem as though I'm being unsympathetic on this topic, but I cannot stress enough just how much extra work you will create for yourself if you do this the wrong way. Let iTunes do the management of files. You can still edit the fields for the song, by using iTunes. And Album Artist is there.
If you ever need to locate the file for a song, use iTunes: highlight the song, right-click/Show in Windows Explorer, or simply look at the Song Info/File tab for the location of the file.