Duplicate albums in album view

Select the both albums with a ctrl-click, press ctrl-i to Get Info, change the album name to <Album>X click OK, get info, change it back to <Album>.

Repeat as required. For more into see Grouping tracks into albums.

tt2

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2

This fixed some my issue too 🙂 Thanks. I just find it annoying that one actually has to do that in the first place.

Unfortunately it does not fix all albums. I have tried to rename the album a few times to no avail. Any suggestions?

The solution to your problem should be somewhere in the Grouping tracks into albums article. Post back details and I can explain further.

tt2

Apparently I was not meticulous enough. When I looked closely at one of the track's info, it turns out the 'part of a compilation' was checked. 😝 Thanks again though!

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2

It helped! Thank you for your assistance,

This worked for 2 of my albums that are showing double. I have 4 more that it won't work for and I don't know what to do. I tried renaming it and then naming it back to normal but it goes back to the same thing. Sometimes when I rename it to X some of them are grouped closer so instead of 5 there are 2 and then when I group them back with their regular name they go back to 5. and all the information other than that is completely identical and none of them are marked as compilations. Please help!

There seems to an underlying bug in iTunes 12 that may prevent correct execution of the logic that groups tracks into albums. This can normally be fixed as follows:

• select all the tracks that should be grouped as one album
• right-click > Get Info
• edit the Album value to append a "dummy" character - e.g., change "To The Sea" to "To The Seax" and click OK
• the tracks should now group correctly - if so, reverse these steps to remove the "dummy" character

Note also that there's no need to enter values for Sort Artist, Sort Album Artist and Sort Album unless you want these values to be different from Artist, Album Artist and Album respectively. In your last example it would be valid to enter "Johnson, Jack" as the Sort Artist and Sort Album Artist if you want to sort solo artists by last name rather than first name.

tried that too and did not work. I added an x to the end and they still remain separate. I know about the sort fields but did it so that maybe it would force iTunes to group them together even though it seemed to not recognize they should be together. I took away the sort fields now in the one I added x to the end of and still the same

Try adding a trailling X to all of the principle fields for one of the albums, close iTunes, then reopen. has it merged now?

tt2

yes, it worked!! thank you so much. they combined when I did but restarted iTunes for good measure. Now I just have to hope that this won't **** up on my iPod instead. this was way too much work for a very small issue that shouldn't have been. thanks again!

Hmmm ... two other possibilities:

• Your media files are read-only or Windows permissions are preventing the embedded metadata from being updated (this is less likely as the symptoms here are more usually that metadata changes are not persistent after editing).
• If your media files are in mp3 format, there could be multiple/conflicting tags - iTunes can have problems in resolving cases where metadata values are held in two or more different ID3 tags. You can either check and fix this in a 3rd party mp3 tagging tool, or within iTunes:
  • right-click on tracks, select Convert ID3 tags ...
  • Set the ID3 version to None a couple of times then set it to v2.3

The other option that sometimes works (though there's no obvious rationale for it!) is to select all tracks that should be part of one album, set the Album is a compilation... flag, and click OK. This should force the tracks to be grouped correctly as iTunes will only be looking for common values of Album. If the album does then group correctly, reverse this process and hopefully the grouping should be retained.

Although this is somewhat clutching at straws, you could also try applying the "dummy character" method to the Artist, Album and Album Artist tags.

🙂 ... I was about to edit my last post to suggest closing and reopening iTunes as part of the "clutching at straws" method - when iTunes starts up it loads its database and presumably evaluates the "album grouping" logic afresh. Obviously some straws are worth clutching at 😉