iPhone and compilation albums?

The update put out 2 days ago is not working for my compilations which are grouped under album in itunes and on the iphone if there are 20 artists on the compilation i will have 20 albums on the iphone with album name and each artist underneath as if there are 20 albums when actually there is only 1 compilation album with 20 different artists apple seem to be aware of the problem does anyone know a way around it

In iTunes, for all the songs in the compilation album,
either
Check "Part of a compilation"
or
Set the "Album Artist" tag to 'Various Artists'
or both.
Then your "Album View" on iPhone will be OK.

But the "Artist View" still contains all the artists in the compilation; this is the problem discussed in this thread, and there is no workaround on OS3.1. (You can set the "Sort Artist" tag to 'Various Aritsts' but all the artists are still listed under the section 'V' of the "Artist View".)

Ok, I'm new to the iPhone but this is one of the hickups I've seen so far.

Have any on tried to add another Genre to the "non-compilation" albums. The Genre lists the Artist anyway, so its a good start. Then you then to append an extra (can that be done? like "Rock;Albums") Genre to all albums that are not part of a compilation. Then you choose to browse the Genre "Albums", this should list all artists who have their own albums.

Will this give you all the access needed?
Is there a way to append (add to the end of the existing) a Genre when selecting multiple tracks with different settings (Rock, Pop, Punk etc etc), you don't want to loose the original Genre?

Seems like iTunes doesn't support multiple Genre entries for one song...

I've already sent my feedback to apple several times.
I honestly don't think it'll do any good. I might have better luck throwing a rotten pear at a building and knock it over.

Not enough people are complaining about the compilation issue. Therefore apple won't care.

Bump because I'm experiencing the same problem.

If you browse a compilation CD on your iPhone by "Album" putting the artist name in the "Artist" field, and "Various Artists" in the "Album Artist" field displays the album properly.

HOWEVER,

If you want to browse your music by "Artist" on your iPhone, inputting data into the "Sort Artist" and "Sort Album Artist" fields has no effect. The iPhone will still display every single artist in your compilation track when you browse through your artist list.

iTunes seems to utilize the "Sort Artist" field fine, but my iPhone 3GS using latest OS 3.1.2 still makes my "Artists" list an unbearable mess on my phone.

Please advise.

David.Alford wrote:

Please advise.

Well... for starters you can actually READ the thread you posted in. Our troubles issues, and "solutions" are all in here.

@ jt@ebay
The only problem with that solution is that some of us like to keep the artist tag with the original information. I myself don't like to erase who the artist is so I can have that at my disposal if I just so happened to need to know who the artist is at any point. But that's just me. Some people probably won't care about losing that information. I personally like to have the track information.

It's easier, for me, to add something into the sort artist field (except for artist that I have complete albums for (see above for my reasons)).

Everybody needs to call apple support and request for a product specialist and make it as if you dont know why compilations isnt hiding. i spoke to 2 specialist in the past week and they both put me on hold to find out it isnt an option one of the specialists promised me a call back confirming that he spoke with an apple developer to try and have it implemented as an option on the touch/iphone. If we can even have 5 people calling and they speak to 5 other apple developers, we will be in much better shape than we are now. this is a crucial fix for us compilation users it is what creates order on the ipod

I also sent in a message to apple.

I have figured out a workaround. I don’t think its very novel in light of what i have read here but I'll give it anyway because I'm very happy. I spent 6 hours last night trying different things to get this to work. This is what I did...

I clicked on the "GET INFO" to bring up the metadata box and clicking on the "INFO" tab. I copied the ARTIST name and the ALBUM ARTIST name (if different), and pasted it to the COMMENTS section. I then wrote "VARIOUS ARTIST" in the ARTIST section and left the ALBUM ARTIST section blank. That’s it.
I did this for 207 songs. The whole thing took about 45 minutes. It goes very fast. You can hold down the CTRL (command?) button the whole time and use CTRL+C and CTRL+V.

Here is the result. Generally I'm not interested in the artist for the compilations (if you are, then this wont make you happy), but I wanted to keep the name handy just in case. So when I sort by ARTIST, all the one-hit-wonders are no longer listed. They are all sorted under the entry VARIOUS ARTIST. When I click that one, the view is now sorted by album for ALL my compilations. It looks like the compilation view. I can then select an album thru there. Very clean and actually easier than getting to my compilations list.

For those of you that want to try something else, here are a few things I learned:

Sort tab – Sort Artist. You can write anything you want in this field. It will not change the “viewing name”, only change the alphabetic order. Example Artist: Jay Z Artist Sort: zzz In ARTIST VIEW, you will see the name “Jay Z” but it will be alphabetized under zzz. I assume this is the case for all the fields on the SORT TAB. This feature is automatically used by Itunes for artist/songs that begin with “THE” and “A”.

Info Tab: Album Artist – it is used so that you can see in small print who the artist is when in ALBUM VIEW. Also, if Artist is blank, Itunes will automatically copy Album Artist to Artist. I also had this happen. If an album has multiple artists, each artist will be shown in ALBUM VIEW.

NO ARTIST – NO ALBUM ARTIST: Album will not show at all in ARTIST VIEW.

I hope this helps some of you.