Itunes duplicates artists
In an effort to clean up my collection, I'm finally going through artist by artist, album by album, and culling the dupes, getting the right artwork, and matching up all album information correctly.
While this is working okay, iTunes has started to act really wonky. It will duplicate artists names in the column browser, sometimes even for the same album. When I select all the tracks by that artist and enter the name (either again, or sometimes making a phoney name and then renaming correctly) about half the time it consolidates things correctly. The other half I still end up with, say two "Cannonball Adderly"s, with different albums but the same exact name.
Worse, sometimes (like in the case of poor Cannonball) the name is placed incorrectly in the browser. For some reason Apple thinks that "Cannonball" is both a name and an article, like "The" (as in "The Beatles" where it will place it among the "B"s instead of the "T"s, which is how it should). Cannonball gets placed both in the "C"s and then, inexplicably, in the "A"s as well.
I've got the latest iTunes, have tried installing and reinstalling, and have even removed the music and reloaded it, all with no improvement. Also, on this note, I find that when I change the MP3 tags outside of iTunes (using Picard, for example) iTunes seems to have a "buffer" where it still doesn't read the meta information properly until I do a "Get Info". So I assume it's *possible* there's still a weird buffer out there I'm not removing, even on reinstallation (perhaps something in the iTunes library file itself).
My next step is to indeed wipe out that library file, but I don't want to do this lightly as it may mean a lot more work for me (will it? Isn't the ratings and most album art matches stored there? While I suppose the matches will be done again automatically, my ratings certainly won't). Any other ideas?
iPhone 4S
