Q: Artist names not sorting
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Dec 28, 2015 6:51 AMby joe_7399,Hi Garion,
Thank you for participating in the Apple Support Communities.
If you see multiple entries for the same artist in the iTunes Artists sidebar, much of the advice at this link can be useful to your situation--Why aren't songs with the same album art grouped together?
In your Adam Young / Owl City example, make sure that you're editing the song information in both the Details and Sorting tabs of the Get Info window. If you changed the name from Owl City to Adam Young in the Details tab but the songs were still sorted under "O," it's possible the Sorting tab still had Owl City listed as the Artist.
Let us know if this advice helped. If not, I'm wondering a few things:
- Are the songs imported from CDs, purchased from the iTunes Store, or from another online content provider?
- Do you subscribe to iTunes Match or Apple Music?
All the best. -
Dec 28, 2015 7:03 AMby turingtest2,The one-by-one approach probably doesn't help. If you grab all tracks by Owl City at once and Get Info, then set Artist, Album Artist, Sort Artist and Sort Album Artist to Owl City X they should merge together. At this point it may help to close iTunes and then reopen before setting all four fields to Owl City.
tt2
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Dec 28, 2015 8:30 PMby Garion Dochstader,Yes, I always use the details and sorting tab when I organize music. It has only stopped working after the update. Strangely enough, since the update I've copied a physical album to itunes, and imported from an online content provider, both with different results. The Cd was fixable; at least it is currently where it should be. Anything brought in from an outside online source has been unmanageable. Before the update, this has happened, but I've always been able to fix it then.
Sometimes I'll change the data under sorting, but when I come back after seeing that nothing has happen, I learn that the data was changed back. I'll grab all of the songs and apply one artist or album to the sort album or sort artists, but when I check it again it'll say mixed. This doesn't happen with all the music but it happens a lot. I know that the files aren't read only.
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Dec 28, 2015 8:23 PMby Garion Dochstader,Sometimes, if the songs aren't grouping together, I just grab all tracks and create a new album or artist name. Usually, they will then fall together, and I can change the name back afterwards. Now, however, it seems that changing anything about a song, whether I'm doing it one-by-one or grabbing them all, or fixing the data in the sortings/options/details/etc. apparently causes them to become their own artist.
I'll keep messing around to see what I can find, though.
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Dec 29, 2015 5:58 AMby turingtest2,See Grouping tracks into albums for general thoughts on this issue. One section I should really add into that piece is this one on multiple tags which can sometimes cause iTunes to fail to respond to attempts that ought to bring everything together.
Multiple tags (Mp3 files only)
The ID3 specification allow files to have multiple tags in different versions and languages, but iTunes only works properly with single tags. When multiple tags are present it can sometimes fail to apply updates to the tag that it reads back (presumably updating one of the others in the file) and it is also possible that iPod & iTunes may have different rules for which tag they give priority to. This could lead to situations in which everything is properly organised in iTunes but then inexplicably falls apart on an iPod, or tracks that display different information in Windows Explorer or another media player. There are 3rd party tag editors that can manipulate multiple tags but I don't have a recommendation offhand. A workaround in iTunes is to use right-click context menu Convert ID3 Tags... > None a few times to remove all existing tags from a selection of tracks and then Convert ID3 Tags... > v2.3 to build fresh tags with the information still held in the iTunes database. I've read in the past that iTunes isn't fully compliant with the v2.4 spec. although this may no longer be the case, however support for v2.3 is widespread so I would suggest using v2.3 over v2.4. Any embedded artwork will be removed so this needs to be replaced if wanted.
tt2
