I was trying to play an entire CD album that I owned and copied on the Music app on Monterey. Unfortunately some albums have multiple artists, I can only select one music to play. Is there a way of unifying an album like used to work in iTunes? Thanks
ps. here is a picture of a particular CD I have a problem
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 12.6
Hmm, I beg to differ with the comment above. 😲
If iTunes or Music 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:
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.
TL;DR setting the Album Artist to Andrew Lloyd Webber and/or setting all of the tracks to be part of a compilation should resolve these tracks down to a single album. I recommend both.
tt2
Hmm, I beg to differ with the comment above. 😲
If iTunes or Music 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:
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.
TL;DR setting the Album Artist to Andrew Lloyd Webber and/or setting all of the tracks to be part of a compilation should resolve these tracks down to a single album. I recommend both.
tt2
Hi teli63,
Thanks for posting in Apple Support Communities.
We understand that you want to merge several artists for a single album. In the Music app, if all the artists are on the same album, you can sort the library by Album to view it collectively. There isn't a supported way that Apple has in place to change and merge the albums.
Regards.
Thanks turingtest2 for your suggestions, they really worked. Requires some work but I managed to get all my albums on 'Music' merged properly. I used a a combination of adding 'Album Artist' - notice that field only likes ASCII characteres, so you can't really add things like ç and other foreign characters. - and also sometimes setting the "Album is a compilation of songs by various artists" tick mark - or resetting it - one of them works if every track has the same 'Album Artist'. There used to be also a command-line util called 'lame' that allowed people to setup the id3 tags without using the graphical interface, but I couldn't find the right tag for 'Album Artist' - I don't think is a standard tag, so in the end I just used the graphical interface song by song for each album that behaved badly.
You're welcome. 🙂
You should be able to select all tracks from the same album at once before invoking Song Info (cmd+i) for setting common properties, e.g. Album Artist, Album, Compilation, etc. which saves time over track by track changes.
tt2
Playing a CD album in Monterey
