iTunes shows multiple albums for the same album - one for each song

iTunes is awful. According to Apple, I'm not able to put my own mp3s on my iOS device if I'm using Apple Music. Apple Music doesn't have the album I want, so - goodbye Apple Music. Now I'm dragging my mp3s from a folder into iTunes again, just like the old days.

The problem is it creates multiple copies of the same album, one for each song - so an album like "With The Beatles" has 13 songs, and each of those songs shows up as a separate album with the same title. So if I want to listen to the whole album, I can't - I'd have to listen to one song, go back, start the second, go back, start the third, etc. Obviously this is messed up and wrong.

It's not a new problem, but I believe it's a new *cause* of the problem. In years past this was fairly easily fixed by adding an "Album Artist" to the tracks, one that matched the Artist tag. That would fix it. Now - it does not.

Here's what it ended up being - iTunes is extremely particular about ID3 tags. Specifically, it won't accept an mp3 file with an ID3v1 tag. Furthermore, the fields it _will_ accept in an ID3v2 tag must be acceptable to iTunes - so custom tags, for example, will cause the same problem.

Here's how I fixed it: I used the program kid3 to manage my ID3 tags. For a given album, I'd select all the tracks for that album, then remove the ID3v1 tag, and the ID3v3 tag. Then, I'd add an "Album Artist" tag (still required, thanks iTunes) and make sure it matched the Artist field. I'd delete any fields that were unusual or suspect - any tags in all caps, any tags that weren't necessary. Then I'd save the ID3v2 tags to the mp3 files.

Usually - *usually* - that would work and I'd now have a lovely single album with all the songs in it to play - huzzah I've beaten iTunes into a reasonable submission that resembles normal operation!! However - even after all that futzing around, it would sometimes still spit out multiple albums, one for each song. In those cases, I'd delete them from iTunes, go back to my ID3 tags, once again remove ID3v1 and ID3v3 tags, once again check that all ID3v2 tags look good - no special characters? No hidden spaces? . . . and save it again. That would usually work. One at least one occasion, I noticed that even with no changes at all to the ID3 tags, iTunes did the multiple-album thing until I literally watched the Music app while dragging files into it via iTunes . . for whatever reason it worked that time too.

Good luck! And of course it'd be great if Apple fixed this, etc. etc. but we all know how that goes. I'm going back to editing all 700,000 of my mp3s so that iTunes will deign to represent them properly for the few minutes I'd like to listen to them. Yeesh.