Album Artist and compilations

Hi, there is a checkbox on the Details page of the Get Info window named "Album is a compilation of songs by various artists". You need to check this for every song in the album to let iTunes know it's a compilation.

Hope this helps!

Alexander

Checking the "Album is a compilation ..." flag makes albums appear in the separate "Compilations" listing and - if you've configured iTunes to organize your library folders and files - changes where media is stored. Unless you are using an iPod Classic or other older model that doesn't support the Album Artist tag use of the "Album is a compilation ..." flag is unnecessary: setting a common value for Album Artist is functionally equivalent and results in albums being sorted by the Album Artist value.

Based on the symptoms described by mikeynl I suspect that the first album has the "Album is a compilation ..." flag checked and the second one does not. The "Mixed" entry under Sort Artist is simply the result of tracks having different values for this tag, and doesn't affect album sort order.

Are most of the tracks in the first album credited to the same artist? iTunes 12.4 seems to have introduced a new set of sorting rules that individual track's Artist values into account, so that even if the "Album is a compilation ...: flag is checked albums may not end up in the "Compilations" section of Albums view. Its definitely the case when all tracks of an album are by a single artist, the album will sorted based on that Artist value, even if the "Album is a compilation ...: flag is set. Some testing would be necessary to determine what these new rules regard as "most" tracks being associated with one artist in order to override an album being displayed as a Compilation.

Note that if you don't use the "Album is a compilation ...: flag, and group compilations based on a common Album Artist value alone, these issues become irrelevant and you gave full control over sorting order.

Hmmm ... sounds like there's still a lurking bug somewhere in 12.4.1, though as I said in an earlier response this can be avoided completely by unsetting the "Album is a compilation ..." flag. Unless you have an iPod Classic or older "clickwheel" model the use of this flag is unnecessary.

I've been having a similar problem since upgrading to 12.4 and again to 12.4.1. I sort many of my playlists by "album by artist/year" and the albums that are compilations I sort by typing "Various Artists" in the album artist field (all the songs are by different artists). For some reason, iTunes has thrown a bunch of these albums at the bottom of my playlist, out of order, even after I unchecked the "Album is a compilation" flag. I can't seem to find any difference between the albums that are in the correct order and the ones just thrown at the bottom.