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iTunes albums splitting

My question has sort of been covered in older posts so I will keep it brief. Why are albums that have been in my iTunes library, normally for years, now splitting into two, three or even more albums with a few songs each in them. I don’t understand what has changed to make the songs split out if they were perfectly content before. And how do I get them to merge again without going through the trouble of changing the album info on each song! Completely ridiculous!

iPhone 8, iOS 12

Posted on Jun 21, 2019 6:53 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 22, 2019 7:36 AM

Some views are less album friendly that others. Adding new content to the library can occasionally affect the way existing content is displayed. Purchases from the iTunes Store that you've edited may occasionally revert to the current version of the store metadata for those tracks.


If iTunes shows multiple instances of an artist or an album then what generally works is to select all related tracks and use Get Info to add say a trailing X to each of the fields that the tracks should have in common:

  • For an album; Album, Album Artist, and Artist (if artist is the same for all tracks) *
  • For an artist; Album Artist (and Artist unless there are guest/featured artists listed which should not be changed)

Apply the change which merges things together, then remove the excess characters. Occasionally it may help to close and reopen iTunes between the two renaming operations. Part of a compilation should also be set consistently.


* If tracks are to be synced to a non-iOS device there should be a common Artist and/or the album should be set as a Compilation.



Use the songs view and display the fields Album, Sort Album, Album Artist, Sort Album Artist, Artist and Sort Artist side by side so you see whether or not it is appropriate to edit Artist and if sort values could be causing any further problems. See Grouping tracks into albums for more help if required.



One further tip for really stubborn duplicates. At one point I had three lots of Various Artists in the artists view of my iTunes Match library that wouldn't respond to the usual trailing X treatment. What I found worked was to add the trailing X to start with, but then with each group that iTunes wanted to keep separate start typing a value and let iTunes autocomplete from say Var... to Various Artists. Picking from the autocomplete lists seemed to work when pasting/editing the whole value didn't.



tt2

1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 22, 2019 7:36 AM in response to croy1776

Some views are less album friendly that others. Adding new content to the library can occasionally affect the way existing content is displayed. Purchases from the iTunes Store that you've edited may occasionally revert to the current version of the store metadata for those tracks.


If iTunes shows multiple instances of an artist or an album then what generally works is to select all related tracks and use Get Info to add say a trailing X to each of the fields that the tracks should have in common:

  • For an album; Album, Album Artist, and Artist (if artist is the same for all tracks) *
  • For an artist; Album Artist (and Artist unless there are guest/featured artists listed which should not be changed)

Apply the change which merges things together, then remove the excess characters. Occasionally it may help to close and reopen iTunes between the two renaming operations. Part of a compilation should also be set consistently.


* If tracks are to be synced to a non-iOS device there should be a common Artist and/or the album should be set as a Compilation.



Use the songs view and display the fields Album, Sort Album, Album Artist, Sort Album Artist, Artist and Sort Artist side by side so you see whether or not it is appropriate to edit Artist and if sort values could be causing any further problems. See Grouping tracks into albums for more help if required.



One further tip for really stubborn duplicates. At one point I had three lots of Various Artists in the artists view of my iTunes Match library that wouldn't respond to the usual trailing X treatment. What I found worked was to add the trailing X to start with, but then with each group that iTunes wanted to keep separate start typing a value and let iTunes autocomplete from say Var... to Various Artists. Picking from the autocomplete lists seemed to work when pasting/editing the whole value didn't.



tt2

iTunes albums splitting

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