Multiple Artists on iTunes

I don't know why it happens, but I can suggest ways to fix it.

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

You can usually remove the x afterward but I have found on occasion this just caused the artist to split again.

Yes. The 12.3.3 build was particularly bad for doing this. There seems to be no rhyme not reason to it. I don't know why such bugs are ignored. 😟

tt2

Hi,

This issue appeared for me with iTunes 12.2 and it's really annoying... (still waiting for Apple to correct this bug)

Adding a "X" doesn't always correct this problem for me.

I have found a solution to bring all the songs from the same artist together :

1) Be sure to get all the metadatas right for the artist in "get info" (artist name, album name, genre etc...)

2) Then, go in "songs view" instead of "artists view" and rank the songs by artist name (by clicking on the artist column at the top).

3) Select all the songs from the same artist and delete them : when iTunes asks, select "move to trash".

4) Then go in the trash bin, copy the songs you just deleted and paste them in a folder on your desktop.

5) In iTunes, select "File --> add to library" and select all the songs from the folder on your desktop.

6) Now all the songs from the same artist should be together in "artists view".

I hope that helps !

Thanks Nicolas. It seems that this is working for me as well.

But how does it come that this problem is suddenly there? I'm working with iTunes now for years and all these years it was very easy for me to sort my music and make a nice library. But with this bug/problem it takes a lot more time and it becomes very inconvenient. Does anyone has an idea if they will fix this?