Unknown Artist vs Various Artists

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Level 4

3,372 points

Unknown Artist vs Various Artists

I am using iTunes 11.0.4 (4) and I'm mystified by its organisational behaviour:

Take two separate albums, both ripped from original CD, both compilations containing tracks from various artists. The compilation option is selected, so their files are both in .../iTunes Media/Music/Compilations/ Neither has an Album Artist set, yet when I go into the Artists view in iTunes one appears under the Compilations 'artist' and the other is not there. If I select 'All Artists' I can scroll down the list of albums by artist and I eventually find the missing one under "Various Artists", however when I select "Various Artists" in the artist list only albums with that written explicitly in the Album Artist appear.

Just to finally seal my confusion: if I try to sync the albums to an iOs device by selecting them manually in the Music tab, one appears as "Various Artists - album name" and the other as "Unknown Artist - album name".

I appreciate that I can probably solve the problem once and for all by setting the Album Artist for all mixed compilations to "Various Artists", but is this the right way to do it [and - more importantly - will it work]?

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion, 13" Late 2011 8GB RAM

Posted on Aug 14, 2013 3:39 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Chris CA

Level 10

82,440 points

Aug 14, 2013 3:47 PM in response to Arkouda

Bernard Harte wrote:

I appreciate that I can probably solve the problem once and for all by setting the Album Artist for all mixed compilations to "Various Artists", but is this the right way to do it [and - more importantly - will it work]?

Yes & yes.

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Answer 2

Arkouda Author

Level 4

3,372 points

Aug 15, 2013 5:50 AM in response to Chris CA

Thanks for your advice.

Do you have any idea, though, why an Album with the Compilation property set does not show up in the Compilations list in Artists view? (I have some albums with no Album Artist that do appear here (and others that don't), so there seems to be some kind of bug.)

If I turn off group compilations in the Show View Options preference it means that the only way I can find the album (in this view) is by scrolling through the list of all artists.

Ideally, I would like to see the individual tracks appear under their artist (as I believe is supposed to happen) with the whole album in Compilations.

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Answer 3

Arkouda Author

Level 4

3,372 points

Aug 15, 2013 7:53 AM in response to Arkouda

I have discovered what's happened: and it's worse than I thought.

A huge proportion of my compilation albums seem to have lost their individual track Artist data. (The only cause of this is likely to be iTunes Match.) Those are the ones that, unsurprisingly, show "Unknown Artist".

Now I have a new problem: I have added back the artist data to one compilation album. On the Mac that I did this on, the Album view now shows "Various Artists". However, on another Mac that's subscribed to the iTunes Match account, the Album view show the name of the artist of the first track of the compilation.

One thing that does now work: once I have been through a compilation and re-added artist data to each track, it now appears in the Compilations 'artist' in the Artists view. (Others which seem to have their artist data in tact, do not, but that's now the least of my problems.

I DO have backups, but I am not sure how long ago this corruption occurred so I have some searching to do!

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