Album Artwork - "Various Artists"

Seems to work for me when, for each song, the Album Artist tag is blank, the Artist tag is the actual artist, and the Composer tag is 'Various Artists'.

I'm kind of hoping some bright person will help with this thread. I have the same problem, only with the album Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles. This is not an obscure album.

When the CD is imported it comes in as a bunch of separate artists, with separate artwork unrelated to the album. Then, after I make sure that the album name and the artist name are the same for all tracks, they all come together as one album, but with no artwork. Very frustrating!

Hope someone can advise.

Rob

Message was edited by: Rob Stevenson

go to this link...and copy one of the album covers on this page....ctrl-click <---Mac

<a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://">http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=common thread+song+of+eagles&btnG=SearchImages&gbv=2

I use iTunes for Mac...so, these directions will be for Mac....

In your "music library" highlight all the tracks on the CD....

go to "file" "get info"

make sure at the bottom of the window that pops up..you click "compilation"...you will see (on the right hand side) a box labeled "artwork"....click the button...click inside the box and then "alt-V" and the new album artwork should appear. Click "ok" and you should be in business....

Hope this helps.

I'm not sure if you've done this, but just select all of the songs belonging to the album in question, then ctrl-click to Get Info. In the Complilation drop-down list, select Yes. There is no need to enter an artist or album artist name of Various Artists, as iTunes takes care of this for you. I simply use the Artist tag as with ordinary albums, and file organization and the fetching of artwork from iTMS work perfectly.

If you still have trouble fetching your artwork, please provide the name of the album in question and I'll investigate further.

Thanks folk,

Both of those suggestions helped. The album is now a compilation and each song now has (somewhat blurry) artwork. But...

It is still listed in both the "Grouped with artwork" or "Cover Flow" listings as a bunch of single songs rather than as an album.

Oh well...

Rob

Rob,

I've seen a rather large number of posts recently from other users reporting this issue with compilation albums sorting as a bunch of individual songs with separate artwork for each, and have to admit that I have not experienced this myself. What I would do is show the browser in the iTunes window (View > Show Browser), then make sure there's only one entry for the album under the artist "Compilations." If there are multiple entries for this album, select them all from the library, then try editing the Artist and Album tags, even if you have to manually enter this information. Then, once more, make sure the Compilation tag is set to Yes.

Important: Now, if you haven't already done so, go to iTunes > Preferences > General, and make sure you enable the Group Compilations when browsing.

At this point, as long as the grouping and sorting are straightened out, you may want to select all tracks belonging to the album in question, right-click and select Remove Downloaded Artwork, then use the Get Album Artwork command to fetch the artwork again. Otherwise you may have unnecessary clutter and complications in your Downloaded Artwork folder causing things to not work quite right.

Thanks for persisting with this. I appreciate the help.

I have the album name the same for all cuts; the artist is set to "Various artists" just so it's the same for all; the album artist is set to the name of each artist (I cut and pasted from the artist field.)

Compilation tag is turned on, Prefs are set as you suggest.

There is no Remove Downloaded Artwork command, just Clear Downloaded Artwork, which doesn't remove what I had pasted in but only removes whatever has been downloaded automatically, which was nothing. So I went through the cuts one by one and deleted the artwork I had retrieved.

I selected all the tracks and asked it again to get the artwork, but again nothing. And all the songs remain separate in the browser Cover Flow view.

I'm sure this would all work if the album were in the iTunes store, but alas it's not. Obviously it's in the CDDB, since the song titles loaded automatically, but I guess they don't provide the artwork and whatever magical tag keeps everything tied together.

Rob

P.S.
I made one more attempt, following the hint above. The Artist is now the actual artist (as automatically downloaded), Album Artist is blank, Album is normal, Composer is Various Artists. Still the same problem.

Message was edited by: Rob Stevenson

Isn't that what we're talking about Vincent? There have been various ways used to express the problem, and I used my own album as an example, but it's all the same problem, I think.

Rob

Just a quick reply here... In my case, everything is working, and here's a description of how my compilation albums are tagged:

Artist = set to track artist for each individual track
Album Artist = completely blank
Album = same album name for every track on album
Year = appropriate value
Track Number = appropriate value(s)
Disc Number = appropriate value(s)
Comments = same for every track
Compilation = Yes

Besides the things I've suggested earlier, one other thing that I do to keep things arranged and grouped logically is to click on the Album column for a couple of seconds until the column heading changed to Album by Artist. Without doing this, things can really get to be a mess.

P.S. If you get your metadata from CDDB (Gracenote), then it would be no wonder that your albums get scattered all over the place. I don't use online lookups at all, as I find them to be inaccurate nearly 100% of the time for one reason or another. Often, you'll find that the Genre tag can have different values for different tracks in the same album, Greatest Hits albums by one artist are tagged as compilations, users have no common understanding of when or how to use the Artist and Album Artist tags, etc. My own opinion is that it's worth the time to tag things by hand the right way.