Why are songs from same album listed apart

iTunes will group albums if:

• all tracks have the same value in the Artist field and the same value in the Album field, or
• all tracks have the same value in the Album Artist field and the same value in the Album field, or
• all tracks have the same value in the Album field and have the Album is a compilation ... flag checked

There also seems to be a lurking bug in iTunes 12 such that albums may not group correctly even if one of these rules appear to be satisfied. To resolve this:

• select all tracks that should be part of a common album
• right-click > Get Info
• edit the Album field, inserting a "dummy" character at the start or end of the value (e.g., change "Dark Side of the Moon" to "xDark Side of the Moon"
• the album should now group correctly - you can then repeat the operation to remove the "dummy" character.

I have thousands of songs on my computer and they were all in nice neat folders. The first time I used iTunes it ripped apart segmented and made a total mess of everything I had. I put everything back in order and then it did it again. I was furious because it took days to complete it. Some people might like the way iTunes sorts it but I thought it was the stupidest thing I ever saw.

I contacted Apple and the rep apologized for it happening and said to make individule folders in the iTunes music library, name it and copy/paste the songs into the the album. I had to first reimport all my music and put them in a My Music folder in documents. I won't ever let iTunes search the computer for music again.

You misunderstand how iTunes manages and groups songs, and from your description Apple's rep did a really bad job of dealing with your issue. iTunes does not make any use of how you may have organized music in files and folders. Rather, its library is based around the metadata (properties or "tags") associated with your media - much is which is / should be embedded within media files, though some elements are only stored in the iTunes database.

iTunes' standard operation is actually the reverse of what you describe - if you configure it to organize your library, it uses metadata (artist, album artist, album title, song title, disc and track number) to define and name the folders and files are stored within the iTunes Media folder structure. The symptom you describe ("ripped apart segmented and made a total mess of everything") is exactly what you should expect if you import media that has incomplete or inconsistent metadata.

This worked for me. Thanks

This worked for me with one small difference, an extra step before the final action above "the album should now group correctly....".

What actually happened after inserting the dummy character in the Album field was that it moved the errant songs from far away from the correct album to just under the correct album. So far so good and success was achieved when I removed the dummy character. That made the songs pop into the album group.