Why is iTunes putting same artist multiple times?

1 - View by songs not artist.

2 - Group edit all albums and make a global change to the pop up screen shown by changing the artist name to

aaaaaaaa. and click OK.

3 - Now scroll to the top of your tines list and all the David Bowie albums will be under the same artist name

aaaaaaaa.

4 - Repeat step 2 but change back to the group artist name David Bowie and click OK.

5- If at first it reverts back to separate folder again repeat the steps again or even a third time. They will eventually

group as one and you won't have two separate tabs under the Albums listing.

See Make a split library portable for some guidance on the iTunes Music vs. iTunes Media thing. It would seem your library predates iTunes 9 and has at some point switched to the new media folder name.

See Grouping tracks into albums for more on fixing problem albums. Usually takes me a few minutes to fix up a new album in my library, though it helps I have some scripts for imposing some of my own preferences.

tt2

This happened to me when I had an album imported that didn't have the Artist correctly labeled. I bulk changed the Artist field and ended up with multiple listings of same Artist.

Simply removing the Album from the iTunes Library (not deleting the files from the computer) and then reimporting them solved the problem.

I have two David Bowies in my artist list.

One contains the latest album I have added and the other contains all his other albums.

I have tried everything that has been suggested in this list and NOTHING works, I can not seem to solve the problem.

There must be a solution?

I have this problem often. My solution is for Windows users only (boo!). I do not know how a Mac manages this.

BUT - on a windows PC you have a folder/directory system to store music.

As of this writing (Oct 7 2017) it looks like this.

C:\Users\username\Music\

Then the system has these choices:

iTunes Music

iTunes Media\Music

Each of these has a Compilations folder where albums can be dumped also.

Your albums/artists/music can be down either path. It can feel complicated.

WHAT I DO: After loading a newly purchased CD into iTunes I immediately go to the file manager (Ctrl-E)

and hunt for the folder of the artist/album I just loaded.

More often that not these two problems occur:

1. The album itself is split up into more than one folder, different tracks end up in different folders.

2. The whole list of tracks stays in a single folder, but instead of being underneatch your artist name

it ends up in Compilations.

My goal is this: Get ALL the songs into one folder per album/CD, get ALL albums/CD under one artist name.

Period. This takes work. Every new album/CD has its own challenges but int he end after about half to an hour

all the music ends up properly organized.

So watch out ffor these problems when loading music using iTunes:

1. iTunes creates the artist name in two places - iTunes Music or in iTunes Media\Music

2. Both Media and Music have a Compilations folder, your album might be dumped in there

under the name of the album.

Eventually I want EVERYTHING in iTunes Music\Artist-Name\Album-name format.

When I have done the work at this lower level in Windows File Explorer I start iTunes.

You can easily highlight an entire artist or album, right-click then delete songs from Library.

After that click File -> Load/Add Folder to library. Navigate to iTunes Music\Artist-Name then add

the artist again.

I then connect my ipod and synch getting everything organized the way I want and finding what I want when I want.

ALSO NOTE: Lots of people here contributed correctly that you may need to spend time on Get Info

for each song or album and do things like un-check the Compilations checkbox, I uncheck this on every song.

And you often need to copy/paste the Artist name into Album artist and sometimes Composer name.

I believe the fix is a little easier than described above, but still annoying iTunes has such issues. It's simple to do, but as with many such things, describing it clearly with caveats takes a little more effort...

If the "Album Artist" field for any track or album is explicitly set to a specific artist, then all that material will show under a single instance of that artist in Artist view. No other fields need to be set to the artist or otherwise altered to achieve this. However...

The problem is that multiple (supposedly) similar contents of any given field—even if inspected and found to be identical (similar capitalization, no extra/missing/different spaces, punctuation, etc,), even if then in-place retyped, copy-pasted or re-entered via the drop down suggestions menu that appears when you start typing—are sometimes (still) not recognized by iTunes as identical values, no matter how often you verify them or repeat re-entry. The "secret" as others above have alluded to is that the field contents have to be changed to something else, then changed back globally to the desired name, which somehow forces iTunes to acknowledge the box contents are identical. Simply re-entering the apparently correct value does NOT seem to reliably achieve any change in the way iTunes recognizes field contents, as it surely should.

So, while the only field that needs to be altered to amend this specific issue (i.e., repeated artist names in Artist view) issue is the Album Artist field, the same technique will work to correct other grouping issues (fragmented albums for one) where certain relevant fields appear to be correct, but in some hidden way, are not. There is no need to delete/restore or otherwise move any files around to do this (hahaha... for THIS issue, anyway—pre-purchase downloads present some real hair-pullers 🙂).

1. Go to Album view, and search using desired artist's name. This will bring up all whole albums by that artist, and include any tracks from Compilation or Various Artists albums that are in some way associated with that artist (i.e., artist's name appears somewhere in the track info). This also works if selecting individual or groups of albums or tracks other ways, and using the procedure repeatedly, but this is the simplest way to do it all at once.

2. Select all the tracks (click once in tracks area then Command-A, or click on first item and shift click on last, so all are highlighted blue).

3. "Get info" on all selected tracks. (Right click and select "Get Info", or Edit menu—>Song Info. This brings up info relevant to all the selected tracks at once, and allows a global change across all tracks selected, and does not allow editing of any included individual track's info.

(Note 1: If the Album Artist box is blank, or contains an artist's name, following this method will not overwrite/lose any possibly useful additional info that was unique to one or more tracks—minimal concern in proceeding)

(Note 2: If the box shows a grayed-out "mixed", this is because there are already at least two different entries in that field across all the tracks selected. For any given track, empty is counted as a different entry to text. If there are concerns re what unique info may be in the existing "Album Artist" fields, see bottom of post, "Note 3: "Checking Album Artist info, before changing it", before continuing.)

5. Start to type your artist's name in the "Album Artist" box. The pop-up should suggest the (correct version of the) desired artist's name, so preferably select that, rather than type it all manually.

6. Click directly behind newly entered artist's name so text is deselected and cursor immediately follows last character, then type any single letter (e.g., an upper case X or @, whatever).

7. Hit "OK". You may reassuringly see a progress bar pop up momentarily (or not).

8. "Get info" on all the selected tracks again, and delete the extra character (e.g., the X or @) you added in 6. above.

9. Hit "OK". Again you may see a progress bar, as per 7. above.

10. Return to Artist view and you should find all the multiple instances of the same artist have collapsed to just one.

Et voilà 🙂. It seems like it ought to be effective just to skip 6,7 & 8. In the past re-entering an already-existing value across the same field for multiple tracks worked (say to regroup fragmented albums) but it seems now changing it to something else before changing it back—even though nothing apparent was wrong with initial value—is more reliably effective.

(Note 3: "Checking Album Artist info, before changing it". If the Album Artist box shows the grayed-out "mixed" it's possible useful info is present for one or more tracks. It's more likely many are already the [supposedly] correct value and one or more tracks are blank or contain a slight variation on the correct name. Anyway, to check out the unique info:

—Deselect all the tracks in "Album" view.

—Click once on the first (top) track, right-click and select "Song info".

—Click in the "Album Artist" field once to highlight the name there (easier to monitor field contents in next step).

—Repeatedly click the right arrow at bottom left of Info window and watch for any different/interesting values in the "Album Artist" field. You can click it as fast as you can, anything different will jump out clearly.

—Back up to any different entries that arise and evaluate interest, if any. If worth keeping, a cut & paste into the "Comments" box is one option.

—Continue until all tracks have been scanned in this way.

—Proceed back to 1. above.)

vbr

Barry

Additional thought re Artist view showing multiples:

Maybe, in addition to the procedure in the previous post, changing info in the Sorting tab of the info window is helpful, and most conveniently done at the same time as above. The idea is to change the contents of the artist "sort as" box to just the artist's name globally (same name as ends up in the Album Artist box), leaving the artist entry box above that as is (the "artist" field in Details tab often contains additional/different performers). Not 100% sure on this, but did this step too on the so far three instances of multiple same artists and searches and view modes seem to operating as I hoped. Will edit/correct this post if this can be clarified one way or the other.

iTunes doesn't like multi-disc audiobooks. Here's how I solved it.

Solution 2:
(easy)
1. Just keep it as it. It still works to upload your books to your iPhone.

Solution 3:
(tedious if you have a lot of audiobooks... which I do)

1. Download "Tag Stripper" from the Mac App store (it's free).
2. Locate the MP3 files for the multi disc book.

3. Run the mp3's through Tag Stripper (so it removes the disc info).

4. Select all mp3 files in the folder, right click on the list and select "Rename X items"
5. In the pop-up window select "Format", name format: "name and counter"; custom format "Track "; start numbers at "1".

6. Now re-import the mp3s (it will be all one album that you can rename and change to "audiobook".

Weaselal wrote:

... There must be a solution?

Try this one.

tt2

See Organizing audiobook chapters.

tt2

I also have this problem. I have tried everything I can find through Google e.g. Adding Album Artist, grouping as a compilation (which it is not), deleting and re-entering the Album name and Album Artist name. I have even tried deleting the Disc X of Y data. Nothing works...

Hi,

When I have had this issue, I have selected all the tracks, deleted artist and album artist then click OK. I selected all tracks again and entered Artist name and Album artist name then clicked OK

Jim

Hi Jim

Thanks for your reply. I have tried this with Album name, Album Artist, Disc Number. I don't really want to try it with Artist Name since some of the tracks have "feat. blah blah" as part of the name. I will try though and maybe I can put those in the Comments field while I see if it makes a difference.

If the Album Artist field is working properly this shouldn't be necessary. The weird thing about it is that the artist name in all the left hand entries are exactly the same (I have deleted them from all the affected songs and then re-entered them). The other weird thing about it is the grouping of the tracks into the different examples of the same artist name. It doesn't seem to act consistently - e.g. I would understand if all the tracks where the Artist name is the same as the Album Artist name were grouped together, but they are NOT. There are groups where on some tracks the fields match and others they don't - bizarre!

Will report back when I have changed the Artist name also...

cheers

Lawrence

OK, now I think that there are some bugs in the iTunes software that creates the Artists list on the left-hand side of the screen, in my version (12.3.2.35) running on OSX 10.9.5.

Here is what I have just done:

1. I deleted all the Artist names in the album that is misbehaving (and put all the extended Artist names that I want to keep in the Comments field of each track).
2. I replaced all the Artist names so that they are identical to the Album Artist name. At this stage all of the track of this album were collected under a single Artist name on the left hand section (in Artists view). The problem being that the other two albums by this artist then still showed as a separate item (with identical Artist name) on the left-hand section. So now I have two Craig Armstrong artists listed, one with a single album and the second one with two other albums.
3. Next I selected all of the track from all three albums, deleted the Album name, Artist name and Album Artist name, then replaced all three in all of the tracks. What happened after I did that is that ALL of the tracks from ALL THREE of the albums are now showing as completely separate entries in the left-hand section, each one of them containing a single track!! So this is a worse outcome than I have had the rest of the time!
4. I have checked and ALL of the fields Album name, Artist name and Album Artist name are the same for all of the tracks.
5. Finally I again selected all of the tracks in the original offending album and again deleted Album name, Artist name and Album Artist name from all 15 tracks, went back to Album view, then to Artist view, then back to Song view and re-entered all of the data for all 15 tracks. The album still shows as 15 different Artist names on the right hand side of the screen, each of them with a single track.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here please? Apple Support team, do you actually monitor these discussions, or do you just leave it to users to help each other directly?

Here is a screen shot if that helps (the other two albums by the same artist have the identical problem now):

cheers

Lawrence

I have over 8,000 tracks on iTunes and time and time again this issue appears .... I will remind people that typed text is read as digital code and sometimes iTunes gets a little confused with spaces in the text .. That being said, taking one track and selecting the artist name » album artist » album artist does not always work... Myself, I always follow these steps ..

1. I copy the artist name and paste it to all the get info of each track

2. I then change all but one track with A! in each artist and and album artist and album.... I keep one as a control.

3. I then copy from the control track the artist name and all other relevant information that is required to group them together.

Okay, you might find that only some of the track group together. Next step is to get them all together. Copy the rouge track to the desktop and delete them from the iTunes library to the TRASH. Then, making sure you are on that artists page in your iTunes library , add the tracks to your library.

These are just a few of the steps I've take... and remember, as I always say, when you copy and paste, make sure you are only copying the TEXT and no spaces after it... a space is readable by iTunes as a character!

Note - You might have to quit iTunes completely, the restart it and then add the tracks from the desktop... try different steps and see what happens...