Background music. Sometimes it has to be (sometimes not, of course). So, iTunes is important.
Now, something I don’t get my head wrapped around is how iTunes handles albums. One should believe that if the name of the interpret and the name of the album is identical, that should be enough to know that these songs belong to the same album.
But, sometimes iTunes has it’s own opinion. Today, I imported my new a-ha CD, and as a result, the first song is kept separate from the others, whatever I do.
I tried: Overwriting in “informations” the interpret, the name of the album, the cover picture… nothing helps.
You’ve got to go through the info again. Something isn’t matched up properly.
I find that “Sort Data” is often a culprit, but it could be as simple as having an extra space at the end of the name of the album for everything but the one song.
I bet that the track has a “feat” (featuring) line somewhere in the info dialogs. This will cause the album to be a compilation. If you look in the library browser you should see this as a new category. The down side to this is that if you are looking at a view that sorts by “Artist”, even it artists is hidden, you will have your songs disassociated from each other. To fix it simply change the info for the disassociated song to math one of the properly grouped songs.
BTW I hate this. It is all on one disc. iTunes should stop acting like MS by telling me it is smarter than me. If I insert the disc set the album into to be the same for all the songs. They could fix this by making a separate “track” pane that could contain all the track specifics allowing album specifics to be maintained separately.
It did work in this case, after I changed the title of the album to something else (inserted an underscore) and changed it back afterwards.
But it doesn’t work in another case, where an album is split in 3.
I changed the interpret’s name, the album’s title and tried to put the same cover on all songs - with the result that the album was split in 4 afterwards!
Does anyone know which fields are important?
BTW I have another album that’s split in 7. And I hate this, too.
I have two albums, Mahalia Jackson “Gold Collection” and Ella Fitzgerald “The Gold Collection”, with about 40 tracks each which split into separate tracks that alternate with each other. Drives me mad and I’ve found no way of getting each of them to behave as a single album!
I guess I’m going to have to change the album title of one of them … on 40 separate tracks!
Select a song that works. cmd-i and look at the options on the “info” tab. Study it closely. Close the window. Select the same song and the one that is lost. cmd-i and on the info tab, look for fields that are blank. Any blank field has a difference. Obviously you want the title to be different. Set the rest to match.
Mr X/F, Same for you. you can do all of them at the same time.
Another trick for spotting differences is to use the Next/Prev buttons in the info panel Jaysen described. This will jump between songs and update the meta-data instantly, making it much easier to spot discrepancies between tracks.
Well thanks for the suggestions. This thread had encouraged me to do it by changing the titles on the Mahalia Jackson tracks. I didn’t think of doing it through “Get Info” — and didn’t know you could change data on all tracks at the same time that way — but did it one by one … actually it was 36 tracks. What was so confusing was that they were interleaved
Mahalia Jackson: <track title 1>
Ella Fitzgerald: <track title 1>
Mahalia Jackson: <track title 2>
Ella Fitzgerald: <track title 2>
Mahalia Jackson: <track title 3>
Ella Fitzgerald: <track title 3>
etc.
But it did occur to me to use the “Search” function to find only the Mahalia Jackson tracks, changed the first Album name, but before closing the edit box, copied the name then just pasted into the Album field of rest of the tracks. Both immediately condensed into a single album.
In my experience, it has always come down to these fields being different: Album (even with just a strange space, or different capitalization), Artist, Album Artist, the ‘of tracks’ (as in 3 ‘of 12’), or not having the “part of a compilation” set. Sometimes, it’s just that some tracks have something set (like the compilation setting), but not the rest of the tracks, sometimes it’s the invisible space at the end of a field in some tracks.
The Album Artist can be confusing if you don’t understand that it’s meant to have only one name in it, and it only needs to be used when the Artist fields are different because it’s the main singer/band with special guests on individual tracks. So if you have a Sting album, where he collaborates with a bunch of other famous artists on each track, then “Album Artist” is just ‘Sting’.
Once you do get it sorted out, save someone else the headache by submitting the track information back by going to “Advanced -> Submit CD Track Names”. Be sure to highlight ALL of the tracks for that album when you do this.
I would just like to say that the effect of interleaving Ella and Mahalia might, in fact, be rather cool. As for A-ha, “Take On Me” has to be one of the best music videos ever. I still have dreams where I am flashing between real and cartoon worlds. As readers of this forum will agree. 8)
Definitely! That video blew me away when I was 12, and my better half, knowing I’d been a bit of an A-Ha fan before that part of your teens where you start donning army jackets and pretending all pop music is evil, recently bought me a DVD of early A-Ha tracks - and it’s still a great video.
I hate to be definitive, but no music video ever made is better than the original video for Bob Dylan’s Subterranean homesick blues. And, for those of you still pining over ‘take on me’, school lunches will resume next term and tissues are available from the infirmary.
Age, it appears, is not necessarily a handicap.
Sing with me now: “Maybe it was over when you pushed me out the Rover…” I