Why can i not make a compilation (Also adding artwork sometimes doesn't work)

I suspect that your suggestion to "reduce the size of the name of the album" is actually ensuring that the album name is identical for every track. iTunes is somewhat sensitive to non-obvious variations in some of its metadata values (suggestions include trailing spaces, inclusion of non-printing characters, etc.) - this seems to be more pronounced in iTunes 12 than in earlier releases. Another way to do the same thing is a add a dummy character such as "x" at the start of the common album name; if this then groups the tracks correctly, then edit it again to remove the dummy character and restore the correct name. I have album names in my library that are over 100 characters long without issues. I can't find a reference to an actual maximum length - I'm sure that there is one, though its possible that this is more a limitation of the embedded properties of media files in Windows rather than an inherent limitation of iTunes. Your suggestion to "Reduce the size of the name of the album, this has to be done on all the songs which you can do manually, where they are originally stored in windows file." is OK as long as you do so before adding the songs to your iTunes library. If you do so afterwards you may end up with apparent inconsistencies - iTunes will only update what you see when you play any songs that had their metadata edited directly in the media files.

You can achieve the same result by editing fields within iTunes - just select all the tracks that should be part of the album you're interested in (use Shift-Click to select contiguous tracks, Ctrl-Click for those that are not), then right-click > Get Info. Sometimes you'll see an obvious mis-match of values if iTunes displays "Mixed" in grey text in the Album field - in this case you can just type in the correct value and it will update all the tracks. Otherwise use the "prepend a dummy character" method as above to enforce identical values.

In general, compilation albums (i.e., those containing tracks by several different artists) will be grouped correctly in iTunes if:

• the Album value is identical, and the "Part of a Compilation" flag is set for all tracks, or
• the Album value and the Album Artist value are identical for all tracks

The "Part of a Compilation" flag is really only necessary for older models of iPod that don't recognize the Album Artist tag - the second option above gives some additional flexibility, in that you can decide how you want to label the "collection of artists" responsible for the album (if you leave Album Artist blank and set the "Part of a Compilation" flag then iTunes will automatically list it as being by "Various Artists") and you can also set the Sort Album Artist value. As an example of the latter, I prefer to sort the classical albums in my library by composer rather than artist; I have a number of albums that contain several works by the same composer but performed by different orchestras/conductors/soloists. Using the second approach listed above, I can:

• set the Artist value on individual tracks to the correct value - this will not be a common value for all the tracks making up the album
• set the Album Artist to "Various Artists"
• set the Sort Album Artist to the name of the composer - so, for an album collecting several works by Beethoven, this would be set to "Beethoven, Ludvig van" and would be listed along with other recordings of Beethoven's works.

Two other consequences of the alternative approaches to tagging compilations:

1. using the "Part of a Compilation" flag:
   • all compilations will appear at the end of an artist-sorted list of albums
   • if you have configured iTunes to manage your media folders, the songs from each compilation will be stored in iTunes Media\Music\Compilations\album_title
2. using the Album Artist method:
   • compilations will be sorted based on the Album Artist (or, if set, Sort Album Artist) value - so if you set the Album Artist to "Various Artists" and leave the Sort Album Artist blank, these will be sorted with the V's - in my case, such compilations sit between Van der Graaf Generator and Suzanne Vega (sorted, of course, as "Vega, Suzanne")
   • if you have configured iTunes to manage your media folders, the songs from each compilation will be stored in iTunes Media\Music\album_artist\album_title

Following up on the artwork issue:

iTunes supports two ways to associate cover art with albums:

Right-click on the album and select Get Album Artwork - if the same album is available in the iTunes Store (matched by artist + album title) the artwork will be downloaded automatically.

Otherwise, you can use artwork from other sources (images found on the 'net, your own scans of CD covers, etc.). Right click on the album, select Get Info, then the Artwork tab. It'll look like this (iTunes 12.1):

You can then add an image in any one of three ways:

1. Click the Add Artwork button, navigate to and select an image file you want to add, click Open.
2. Drag and drop an image file from Windows Explorer to the Artwork tab
3. Copy the image file to the Windows clipboard, either by right-click copy on the image file, right-click copy on the image in a web browser, or copy within any graphics program, Then switch to iTunes and with the Artwork tab selected press Ctrl-V. Prior to iTunes 12 you could also right-click > Paste in this scenario, but - either by intent or as the result of an unfixed bug - this has been missing from iTunes 12.0 and 12.1.

For manual addition of artwork, there are three cases where the image you select may not be correctly embedded in your media files:

• your media are in a format that doesn't accommodate embedded artwork - typically WAV files. To embed artwork you'll need to convert to another format - Apple Lossless or AIFF if you want to preserve lossless quality, AAC or MP3 otherwise.
• your media files are read only - to fix this, use Windows Explorer to find the folder that contains your files, right-click and select Properties. On the General tab there's a check box labeled "Read-only" - click the box so that the flag is unchecked and the box is white. Click OK, and then OK again when the "Apply changes to this folder, subfolders and files" option selected. Now try adding the artwork again.
• Windows permissions issues are preventing iTunes from updating your media files (there's some anecdotal evidence of a change in this behavior in iTunes 12). See turingtest2's notes on Repair security permissions for iTunes for Windows for advice on fixing this, then try adding the artwork again.

I suspect that there is a minor bug lurking somewhere in iTunes where some of the data that causes tracks to grouped into albums isn't being updated correctly or the updates are not being recognized. I've had occasional cases where albums just refuse to group properly unless I check the "Part of a Compilation" flag - which causes the tracks to be grouped correctly - and then uncheck it again. Although there's no obvious logic to it, the album then stays grouped correctly.

Likewise, the addition of a "dummy" character at the start of an album title that appears to be identical for all tracks shouldn't logically make any difference - but it does. Just like your route of shortening the album title, its possible that there is some grouping code that is triggered by certain metadata changes but not all. I've certainly spent time in the past checking album titles and muttering "it's the same, it's the ******* same ...", even though the tracks are not grouped properly - sticking "x" at the front of the album title and then deleting it again works, even though there's no obvious reason why it works 😉

I couldn't resist some experimentation ... 🙂

Looks like there is an upper limit on Album values in iTunes - 255 characters. However, I wasn't able to reproduce the case where a compilation album with a title of that length wouldn't group as expected either by setting the "Part of a Compilation" flag or by setting the Album Artist to a common value. I actually created a test case using some MP3 files and (outside of iTunes) assigning what is supposedly the world's longest album title:

"The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether From Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won"

(familiar to fans of Chumbawamba. of course) - which is apparently 864 characters long! This was saved correctly within the MP3 files, but when imported into iTunes was truncated to:

"The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether From Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture."

I did try pasting in some non-printing characters, adding a trailing space, etc. to some of the tracks but couldn't reproduce the "absolutely won't group" behavior.

Having looked into / thought about this a little further I suspect that my original comment about "ensuring that the album name is identical for every track" isn't quite right. The observed behavior of iTunes suggests that editing the metadata that's used to group tracks into albums forces the grouping to be re-evaluated, where this may not happen when media is initially imported. It's as if you import three tracks with artist / song name / album title as follows:

• "Artist 1" / "Song 1" / "Compilation Album"
• "Artist 2" / "Song 2" / "Compilation Album"
• "Artist 3" / "Song 3" / "Compilation Album"

and then set the "Part of a Compilation" flag, this doesn't always cause the album to be grouped correctly. Modifying the album title - by shortening it, adding a dummy character, or simply temporarily changing it to something completely different - seems to trigger the grouping logic again, which this time is evaluated properly. This doesn't just happen with compilations - I've seen the same thing with regular, single-artist albums, and I recall that when updating from iTunes 11.4 to 12.0 a few albums that had previously been grouped correctly were suddenly - and inexplicably - split into two. The same remedies - editing the album title and/or setting/unsetting the Compilation flag - did fix these.

One thing to note is that iTunes doesn't really have the concept of "album" in its data structures (at least through evidence of the way that these are serialized in the iTunes Library.xml file and accessed through the APIs used by VBScripts, etc.) - it handles the album title as a property of a song, so every time you load iTunes, switch views, etc., it is presumably evaluating this property data and determining "on the fly" how songs are to be grouped into albums.

What the "something" is that causes the grouping to be incorrect initially would require access to Apple's design and source code, since it seems that no-one in the user community has been able to determine exactly the circumstances that result in this behavior.

No-one from Apple's development teams reads these pages (at least, not "officially"). You can use their iTunes feedback pageto submit bug reports, enhancement requests, etc.

Did you try:

• select all the tracks that comprise the compilation
• right-click > Get Info
• enter a completely new (i.e., "wrong") value for Album
• enter "Various Artists" as the value for Album Artist (any "dummy" value will do here)
• uncheck the "Part of a Complation" flag

If this groups the album correctly, then reverse these changes one at a time until you get the result you want - hopefully the grouping will be preserved.

Although these shouldn't affect grouping you might want to add the Sort Album and Sort Album Artist elements to the list - changing these to "dummy" values as with Album Artist just might have an effect.

"i will do a fresh install of itunes but i dont hold out much hope"

Although installing a new version shouldn't affect your library, it is always a good idea to take a backup of it before you start - see turingtest2's user tip on Backup your iTunes for Windows library with SyncToy for a suitable/recommended method. Although its generally a good idea to run the latest version of iTunes, you should note that:

• behavior with respect to grouping albums doesn't seem to have changed between iTunes 11 and 12 - indeed, the problem may have got slightly worse
• a significant number of users reported major playback issues (from "static" and stuttering to complete loss of audio output to Bluetooth speakers) with the 64-bit version of the first release (12.1.0.71) of iTunes 12.1

"ive asked itunes now not to collect artwork but it continues to do so. I done this as it was collecting wrong artwork even though the name was the right name for album"

I assume that you've unchecked the Automatically download album artwork option in Edit > Preferences > Store. It may also be worth unchecking these two other options:

then restart iTunes. This will stop iTunes "refreshing" information for iTunes Store purchases. Also note that the Get Album Artwork function only matches based on artist and album title - its not unusual for this to pick up the wrong artwork or, at least, artwork for a different edition of the album you're looking at.

As given, reinstalling iTunes is unlikely to have any impact on the way iTunes organizes and groups things, unless perhaps you have a missing configuration file. See Grouping tracks into albums for more details on how to fix things.

tt2

I'm pretty sure that all text fields in iTunes with the exception of Lyrics and Description are limited to 255 characters, even if the ID3 specification might allow more in some places.

tt2

I had actually assumed that would be likely, but couldn't immediately find anything online to confirm it ... hence the test 😉

Do you think that there's merit in the idea that using "dummy characters" to group tracks correctly is actually the consequence of an edit that forces the grouping logic to be re-evaluated? It seems a reasonable explanation for the observed phenomena ...