How do I get rid of the "album" organization in the first column??

Oddly enough I like having artwork enabled in the songs view, and one of benefits is that you can see if iTunes is correctly grouping all of the tracks of an album under a single cover or has them broken up for some reason.

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

I'll take a guess that you're using the Songs view, which looks similar to this (you may not have the Column Browser displayed):

That picture, which I've reduced in size isn't clear enough, so zooming into the songs list, we see this:

It may look as though the list is being sorted by the album name, but in fact it is being sorted by the date when the songs were imported into my iTunes Library. You can see this by the arrow in the column header for the Date Added. You can click on any column header to sort by that column. Clicking on the same column again usually reverses the order. You can drag any column left or right to re-position it.

if this doesn't address the issue, please provide more information about the view you e=are using and what you would like to see. This is not an insurmountable problem.

Is Artwork enabled in the Songs view? If so you cannot simply right-click the heading and untick to remove it. When enabled it is fixed at the left hand side. As with the other Album column you can click the heading to cycle between Album, Album by Artist and Album by Artist/Year, and invert the sort order. Use View > Show View Options to turn off Show artwork.

tt2

trixeenyc wrote:

Thank you...actually the problem was what tt2 said. I turned off the "show artwork" and it went away!

Yes, I can see that now.

I've never used show artwork in the Songs view. Can't say I like it now that I've checked it out.

Glad you've sorted out your issue though.