I tunes split an album into 4 pieces. I was able to consolidate it down to 2 pieces by ensuring the spelling and spacing was all the same in the title and artist spaces.
However, now that everything is exactly the same, it still won't consolidate to one album. Shouldn't there be a way of manually putting the songs into one album?
iPod 5th Generation (Late 2006), Windows 8
Generally setting a common Album title and Album Artist will fix things.
For deeper problems see Grouping tracks into albums.
tt2
"Shouldn't there be a way of manually putting the songs into one album?"
Yes, there should - but unfortunately there isn't. iTunes doesn't have an object that represents "one album" - it uses the metadata associated with individual tracks to group them into albums in appropriate UI views. As tt2 says, having identical values for Album and Album Artist (or Artist, where this is genuinely the same for all tracks, and Album Artist is left blank) will group albums correctly. Possible remedies, having selected all the tracks that should be part of the album:
If the problem persists post some screenshots showing the details of the problem ... that may help to diagnose and resolve the issue.
Well I finally fixed it, bit the fix was bizarre. I highlighted all the songs that were supposed to be in the album and then just added a random letter to the field "album artist" and that fixed it. This field was blank before
That is a little weird, though its possible that some of the Album Artist values had one or more spaces. Also, you didn't say which version of iTunes you're using - AFAIR iTunes 11, when displaying information for multiple tracks, would show a field as "blank" when the individual tracks have different values. iTunes 12 will show "mixed" when this is the case.
Glad you sorted it out!
I'm using iTunes 12 and change.
I've been transferring a bunch of older CDs into my iTunes so i can put the CDs in storage and I'm finding it's splitting individual albums up with some frequency -- like maybe one in three has an issue.
So far, the fix has been the same -- highlight the songs and place a random letter in "album artist"
BTW, I found a version of this fix on You Tube, only the guy says to insert a blank space in the "album artist: field. That has failed to work for me, but a random letter works just about every time.
It would be so much easier if we could just drag songs where we want them in iTunes. Some of my older CDs are long out of print and came with sometimes a significant number of extra tracks (like Rykodisc CDs) that iTunes doesn't even recognize.
I'm spending a lot of time not just consolidating the tunes into their proper albums, but sometimes I even have to manually type in the track names and find artwork for the album.
Unfortunately that's the way it is. iTunes has just one online source to match artist/album/track information with CDs - Gracenote - and that is nowhere near complete and in some cases full of inaccuracies. A big part of the problem is that much of the content is consumer-generated, i.e., people upload the metadata that they've entered in iTunes or other applications and there is absolutely no quality control applied to it ... don't get me started on those who think that discs 1 and 2 of a double album are different albums, or those who append "(Live)" to every track of a live album ..
The issue over variations in Album Artist values is a little strange - iTunes 12 does seem to have slightly different behavior in this respect compared to earlier releases. Best approach when albums are not grouping correctly are to:
I've no firm evidence for this but sensitivity to trailing spaces, some non-printing characters, etc. could explain why metadata that appears to be consistent does not correctly determine grouping into albums.
Itunes split an album into separate pieces
