Albums with featured artists sorted as compilations, and can't sort them into Album artist because it sorts the CD into its individual artist on the album

in iTunes:

select all songs in the album, then Menu-File-Getinfo, uncheck "Album is a compilation...."

Should not do that.

All songs selected -> Getinfo -> see that the name of the album is in the "album" field.

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. Occasionally it may help to close and reopen iTunes between the two renaming operations.

* 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

Go back to the getinfo of all songs in a album as we have said before:

in the "Album Artistname" set the name of the artist that you want as artist for the whole album.

In my iTunes I set as you did except i uncheck compilation !

And here it works correctly then.

Lex

For this particular album I would set compilation as false since there is a definite album artist, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Use the songs view and display the fields Album, Sort Album, Album Artist, Sort Album Artist, Artist and Sort Artist side by side. For an album like this you want to make sure that sort artist is blank, or each value is related to the value in the artist column, not the value in the album artist column.

I would select all tracks from the album at the same time, get info. set the album artist to Macklemore & Ryan LewisX, the album to This Unruly Mess I've MadeX, untick Album is a compilation... and click OK. In the artists view this should have collapsed the album artist into one grouping. Close iTunes. Reopen. Go back into Get Info and remove the two trailing Xs. The artist entry should remain as one thing.

tt2

Hi TT, I have more than a dozen of these albums. They all behave with the settings I have mentioned here. As soon as I check Compilation they split up as with the OP. Something I do not understand. But here everything is under control at least.

And here the picture:

Lex

Compilations are treated somewhat differently on pre-iOS devices, but in general Album Artist alone should work to keep things together in iTunes and on iOS devices. There are two somewhat obscure settings that you can reach by enabling the Column Browser in the Songs view. In the past these have affected behavior in other bits of iTunes though that seems a bit erratic. Once there you can use View > Column Browser > Group Compilations and Use Album Artists. I'd recommend both options are ticked.

Normally I don't have any trouble getting my content to merge together, but I just tried experimenting with getting iTunes to list the individual artists from this EP in the left hand column which should be possible if there is no listed album artist and compilation isn't ticked. I managed to do that but got completely blocked when I tried to reset things to normal. At first I had five Various Artist listings, four with the blue cover. I got it down to two comprised of 12 albums, so one was clearly split between the two groups. In the end I gave up and restored the database and the various artists files from backup. Clearly this bit of iTunes is more broken than usual. 😮

tt2

In this example the track artists are not correctly filled in, nevertheless ticking compilation shouldn't split the album up. 😕

tt2

What version of iTunes are you using such that you see "Compilations" under "Recently Added"? When I view my library in Artist view I don't see a "Compilation" category:

I definitely have Compilations, and most that are designated as such appear on the left side according to the Album Artist I've selected, usually "Various Artists" but I do have designated Compilations where the Album Artist is something else, e.g. "Albert King & Otis Rush" is the Album Artist for this Compilation and you can see it appears within the proper Artist order, while remaining designated as a Compilation:

Here's the Get Info for that album:

My Artist view settings are:

- Sort Albums by Title

- Group Compilations is selected

- Show Recently Added is selected

OS X 10.11.3

iTunes 12.3.2.35