iPod not displaying albums correctly

First, make absolutely certain that there are no tag differences within an Album. The typical error is inconsistent spelling, or inconsistent usage of the Album Artist field. Any differences in the tags for an album will cause the album to show up multiple times.

Regarding the other problems, are you auto-synchronizing the iPod, or manually dragging music to it?

If you auto-sync then any changes/corrections you make in your library should get reflected on the iPod next time you sync. However, sometimes artwork can get hosed up, particularly if you're doing a lot of artwork editing in the library. In that case the simple solution is to disable the "Show Artwork" option on the Music tab in iTunes (when the iPod is connected), re-sync the iPod, then enable the option and re-sync again. This rebuilds the artwork index and usually corrects artwork problems, but only if you auto-sync.

If you're manually managing things, you have to remember that anytime you make changes to your library you need to delete the updated songs from the iPod before replacing them. If you don't, then the iPod will see the updated songs as "new" songs, even though they are the same songs but with some tag differences. Manually managing is a hassle if you're doing a lot of editing in your library. Once the editing settles down then manual mode is pretty easy to live with (but I still prefer auto-sync).

For multiple covers see my recent post on Grouping Tracks Into Albums if rockmyplimsole's tip isn't enough to fix things...
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*Why is artwork not showing on my iPod when it's there in iTunes?*
iTunes will display a cover in many of it's views provided at least one track from the album has embedded artwork. The iPod appears to load only the artwork from track one to create the cover flow and album views which means that it can sometimes fail to display art for albums even when you can see the art in iTunes. Further, when tracks are played on the iPod, artwork is displayed if and only if it exists in the currently playing track, so track one may show art while track two does not.

*How to find tracks without artwork*
To find all the tracks without artwork so that you can update them you can try http://www.stum.de/itunes-find-tracks-without-artwork/ for Windows or http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=trackswithoutartwork for Macs. Use Google, Amazon, Discogs etc. to locate relevant images. Ideally these should be square, 320x320 pixels or above and borderless to give the best results in the various menus. If you have artwork for some tracks of an album, but not others, find the album in the main music folder, select a track with artwork, right-click (Option-Click for Macs) on the art & click copy, then select all the tracks of the album, use CTRL-I or Command-I to *Get Info* and then paste the image into the artwork box.

I say 320x320 because I believe (from using TouchCopy) that it's the size used in the iPod cache so if you're going to crop or resize you might as well work to that size. Otherwise 200x200 is probably good enough.

*Rebuild artwork cache* (as above)
Sometimes the artwork cache becomes corrupt and fails to show correct artwork, even when this is properly set up in iTunes. To rebuild the artwork cache, connect your iPod to iTunes. Locate the iPod in the Sources pane on the left-hand side, then select the Music tab. Remove the tick from *Display album artwork on your iPod*, sync the iPod, reselect the option & sync again.
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Re. Slow start to sync... I find this too. My suspicion is that the sync process has an exponential component, i.e. double the size of the library/playlists to sync and it takes four times as long to build the schedule of updates. My fullish 160Gb can take nearly 30 minutes to sync, usually very little of it involved in transfering files.

tt2

My question is a little different: I have albums in iTunes that display and are sorted correctly, but they either don't show at all or are out of order. I've tried editing name, artist name, etc, to clean everything up but the problem actually just gets worse. I can find the album under the "artists" category, and more of them in "cover flow", though still in apparently random order. Why do these displays not successfully replicate the iTunes album view?

I refer you back to the post on Grouping Tracks Into Albums. I know it's a rather long post but as far as I'm aware I've tackled all the different issues that can give rise to multiple covers, tracks appearing out of order etc. Take an album you know has problems and work through each item in turn to see if it has any bearing. I'm sure you'll find the solution is there somewhere.

tt2