Combining albums leaves leftover song

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.

One further tip for really stubborn duplicates. I had three lots of Various Artists in the artists view of my iTunes Match library the other day that wouldn't respond to the usual trailing X treatment. What I found worked was to add the trailing X to start with, but then with each group that iTunes wanted to keep separate start typing a value and let iTunes autocomplete from Var... to Various Artists. Picking from the autocomplete lists seemed to work when pasting/editing the whole value didn't.

tt2

I've consistently had this problem for months. The solution offered doesn't seem ideal. I've also tried a version of that solution (renaming the album for all tracks) but it usually results in a different track being kicked out.

Does apple have anything to say about this? It's fairly annoying and seems like an obvious bug.

Apple don't generally comment, but you would think they have had enough feedback on these problems by now. 😟

The forum software broke the link to http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp in my earlier post. It would be much nice if you could simply drag and drop one repeated album or artist onto another and have iTunes confirm that you wanted to merge them, but since that feature doesn't exist tweaking metadata is a way that does. Once you're used to doing it then it doesn't take long.

tt2

I may have found a solution (for compilations anyway). Click on the orphaned track/s uncheck 'compilation' and hit 'OK'. Click on the track again and recheck 'compilation' and hit 'OK'. I just did this and it put the orphaned track back in with the rest of the box set.

Setting "Album Artist" to "Various Artists" (without quotes) for all the songs fixed this problem for me.