Albums splitting when going into music?

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

Try the Songs view with the column browser enabled (Cmd+B) and the filter field (Option+Cmd+F). The filter field lets you quickly narrow down the view to tracks that contain a value such as Now That's and the column browser lets you select one or more items that the application might be seeing as separate. This was easier in iTunes when the Songs view included artwork as you could tell at a glance if a single album in album column had multiple artwork in the main display and thus needed attention, but if you scan through the albums view first so you get an idea of what needs to be fixed then using the column browser and filter field should make it easy to pick out the relevant tracks of a target album and keep them in view while you adjust them.

tt2

When your OCD develops sufficiently you find the time. I'm sure I've spent more time organizing my library than listening to it.

tt2