Track info error & divided albums: how to fix track info?

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Level 1

107 points

Track info error & divided albums: how to fix track info?

An album of Beethoven chamber music imported to iTunes from my CD somehow got imported as being from two separate albums, so Op 6 track 1 is on one 'album' and Op 6 tracks 2-6 are on another. The album is in storage so I cannot easily access it. The items are all correctly sorted in one folder in Finder and in the iTunes library, with correct track numbers, but if I reimport the whole thing into iTunes again, it keeps identifying them wrong (3 tracks have a slight variation on the title of the album and of the artists).

Can I use finder or similar to edit the erroneous track info somehow so it will all import correctly? Or convince iTunes that when I select all the songs and change the album and artist info to match, it should stick and oh, by the way, that means it is one album? I don't want to use Join together to create linked tracks because I want to be able to play individual movements on shuffle sometimes as well as to play the whole album at other times.

Edit to add: iTunes 12.9.5.5

MacBook

Posted on Oct 10, 2019 12:32 AM

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Answer 1

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turingtest2

Level 10

274,482 points

Oct 10, 2019 8:02 AM in response to Donot Haveone

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

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