Itunes duplicates artists

I have solved this problem for myself having played around for several hours. it was really bugging me!! My solution worked for me 3 consecutive times with 3 different artists.

First, go to the SONGS list menu, where each song is a line item like the old days. Then sort by Artist.

Then, highlight each and every song by the artist in question. Since the duplicates are listed under the same name, they will be right next to each other and you won't be able to tell which is listed under one "artist" and which is listed under the other "artist", it doesn't matter, just highlight them all. This can take a few minutes if the artist in question has a lot of songs/albums; one of my artists had 46 albums.

Once all the songs are highlighted, right click and click on "get info", where you can re detail all the songs at once.

Next, change the artist on all the songs to a new name. I know you mentioned that you had tried this, but I don't believe that you had tried it from the SONGS list menu. Humor me and try again. For simplicities sake, keep your name similar to the actual name. For example you might list your new name for Cannonball Adderly as "CannonballAdderly" by simply removing the space. Don't worry, this is temporary.

After successfully changing the name, go back to your ARTIST listing menu and notice that the problem MAY have been fixed, except of course that your artist name is now slightly incorrect. HOWEVER, in the event that there are still two separate names, you will probably notice by clicking on each that the artist listing which retains the original name is now relatively small compared to the much larger and more complete listing which has the incorrect name. If this is the case, the next step is to simply highlight each song which has not switched over to the incorrect name, right click on the song and go to "get info" again. This time, notice that each one of these songs has the incorrect name under the "artist" field, but each song also has the correct name under the "album artist" field. Erase the album artist field and hit "OK". Each song you do this with will now disappear from the artist listing with the correct name and move itself to the artist listing with the incorrect name. When you are finished you should have only one artist listing remaining, except of course that the name is still slightly incorrect.

The last step is to go back into the SONG menu listing area and repeat the first steps to change every song back to the correct name. Once again sort by artist, find your artist and highlight each song all at one time. Right click and go to "get info" and change the "artist" field back to the correct artist name.

When finished, double check and you should see all of your songs and albums for the artist are now under one single artist listing which should have the correct name as well.

It worked for me. Good luck.

PS I know this listing was from 4 years ago, I mainly wrote it for others who may be having the problem now. It took me forever to figure out so I figured I might as well tell someone!

Mike,

iTunes has 4 different artist fields per track: The "Artist" and "Album Artist," which appear on the Info tab, and the "Sort Artist" and "Sort Album Artist," which appear on the Sorting tab. Depending on what you are viewing, any of the 4 could be kicking in. So when you do your cleanup, make sure you clean up all 4 of them.

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".

You are correct, but it is not exactly a buffer. When metadata is written to a file external to the iTunes application, iTunes does not update its display until the next time it has occasion to read the file, e.g. you play the song or run Get Info.

Still wish there was a better way to refresh the meta data other than going into each track and hitting info (I guess I could play all my music, but I don't have a few hundred hours to spare :>).

Playing through your entire library sounds like fun! But as a faster way, Forum member Steve/turingtest2 has written a script that forces iTunes to read metadata for each track and update itself. Look for "Update Tag Info on this page.

Hmm, have to say that recent builds of iTunes seem to have made that script less effective. Tapping next as each track starts to play might now be the most effective way of getting iTunes to pick up third party tag changes. 😟

Deleting and reimporting, while it works, means the loss of ratings, play counts, playlist membership, date added info. etc. so should be avoided if possible.

Now Mike, back to Cannonball Adderly...

• Sort fields will be responsible for his name appearing in the As as well as the Cs.
• Part of compilation can make some albums not appear where they are expected.
• A weird "feature" of the search box at the top right of the screen when using the Album List view is that it only searches fields that are visible in the List view. Often a smart playlist can be used to gather together items that won't play ball.
• Inconsistencies between sort values for the same thing, or additional spaces in the main fields, can make what look like identical values appear listed as two or more.
• iTunes is generally case insensitive, but various iPod firmware isn't.
• Occasionally iTunes even refuses to merge two values when both have been edited to some new value. Closing and reopening iTunes usually fixes that one.
• I have a two-year old outstanding bug report on the failure of iTunes to resort the Artists browser column in "Use Album Artists" mode after changes to the Album Artist/Sort Album Artist field. Again closing and reopening iTunes usually resolves that one.

See my article on Grouping tracks into albums for gory details.

tt2

It's in the article somewhere, though not in my previous post here, but sometimes you need to change the value to something different before changing it to what you want e.g. to ValueX then Value. There are also occasions when corrupt/multiple tags or locked files can prevent values from updating properly.

tt2+

I was having a problem with duplicate artists and the same album on the ipid but only the music I bought from itunes. I hid the music from icloud, deleted from ipod and then copied to ipod again. Problem solved.

Hello! I have a duplicate issue with artist "Madonna" on artist view. A few days ago, when playing some of the tracks, a duplicate entry for Madonna was created. The track would disappear from the original Madonna entry and appear on the duplicate artist, and the duplicate list keeps growing.

I have tried renaming Artist and Album Artist to a fake name and renaming, deleting the Sort As fields, deleting Artist and Album Artist fields and then re entering, checking as compilation, letting autofill find the name, nothing is working.

Anyone else experiencing this? Any ideas?

Thanks!

Try grabbing all tracks by both "versions" of Madonna. Use Get Info to set Artist, Album Artist, Sort Artist & Sort Album Artist to Madonna X. Close iTunes. Reopen. Set the four fields back to Madonna.

tt2

This did it, thank you! Any clue what could be the cause? Maybe the large number of files for an artist can cause corruption?

I'm afraid I don't know for sure. As far as I'm aware nothing has changed in my library but I've seen a few posts where people have noticed duplicates appear after an update. I'd normally guess at some inconsistency that previously wasn't causing a problem, however if tracks move from one group to another as they are played that also hints that they've been updated outside of iTunes in some fashion and iTunes is reacting to new data it encounters when it reads back the tag during playback.

tt2