iTunes 12 Keeps having the same artist twice In The Artist Column

Using the Songs view grab all of the tracks by a given album artist that you're having trouble with then Get Info. On the sorting tab add set Album Artist & Sort Album Artist, to <AlbumArtist>X, click OK, then set back to <AlbumArtist>. If you sync your content to a non-iOS device such as iPod classic then you should also make sure artist is consistent across the whole album. I typically move guest and featured artists into the individual songs names.

tt2

🙂

tt2

I have had this problem a little while back and resolved it by doing the solution of selecting the effected titles and rewriting the Album Artist value and, while it worked previously, now it doesn't work at all. It keeps splitting the artist up and all that happens by repeating the process is that it may split them in slightly different groupings. This seems to be a problem whenever new material is added to the library. It seems to trigger something that messes up the artist groupings and creates theses splits. It's making me mental trying to resolve this as I can't see why it would split them like this when the field values are identical. ***?!?!

iTunes seems to have had this issue for a while. Having matching values on import doesn't seem to be enough.

If iTunes shows multiple instances of an artist or an album then what generally works is to select all related tracks and use Get Info to add say a trailing X to each of the fields that the tracks should have in common:

• For an album; Album, Album Artist, and Artist (if artist is the same for all tracks) *
• For an artist; Album Artist (and Artist unless there are guest/featured artists listed which should not be changed)

Apply the change which merges things together, then remove the excess characters.

* If tracks are to be synced to a non-iOS device there should be a common Artist and/or the album should be set as a Compilation.

Use the songs view and display the fields Album, Sort Album, Album Artist, Sort Album Artist, Artist and Sort Artist side by side so you see whether or not it is appropriate to edit Artist and if sort values could be causing any further problems. See Grouping tracks into albums for more help if required.

tt2

Well, as I said, this technique has not been working for me as, when I remove the "excess characters", the Artist splits again. Sometimes adding the character to the Album Artist does not group them together at all and creates different divisions. After 2 hours of messing around with this last night, I did hit on another solution which seemed to work. What I did was delete one of the groups from the database and move it to the trash, then copy the trash contents to a temporary folder and re-import them back into iTunes. In this case, the Artist was split into two sets, one with 40 albums and one with 4 albums. I deleted the set with 4 albums and then re-imported those files and they all grouped under one Artist name. This apparently resets all the database values and removes whatever anomaly is causing the split. Obviously, you should make sure you have nothing else in the trash when you do this and DON'T empty the trash before you re-import the tracks into iTunes.

Another time try closing iTunes after adding the extra characters, then reopen to remove them.

tt2