Compilations/Various Artists Problem

To add to this if even one of the tracks in a compilation is by the same album artist who made the compilation the album will not appear in the compilation category. Perfect example: "Anjunabeats Vol. 12" by Above & Beyond. If I set the album artist to "Above & Beyond" and check the "This album is a compilation..." box the album will NOT appear in the compilation category because Above & Beyond have two tracks included in the compilation. Here is the fix: Once I rename those two tracks artist to "Above And Beyond" (changing the & to And spelled out) the album popped down to compilation category. Basically the album artist cannot have the same identical name as the artist on ANY tracks, not even one track or the album will not appear in compilations. I don't like using Various Artists as the album artist for compilations so I'm glad I discovered this fix. It's annoying that iTunes does not simply obey their own Compilation checkbox but hey what can you do?

UPDATE: Another even simpler method is to just add "Pres." after the Album Artist name. That way you don't need to worry about scanning through an entire album to change multiple track artist names. So the new album artist is "Above & Beyond Pres." which doesn't match the track artists "Above & Beyond" SOLVED!!!!

Importend: if you leave "various artists" in the album artist (like we all learned after years of using iTunes), your remote can not find the artist on a Apple TV. Well it does find, but it will bring you to "various artists" and let you scroll hundred of results. Leave it blank and you have direct access to the song!

Too bad if you only have one song from a compilation it doesn't put the album to the sub group of compilations below. It's a shame Apple doens't supply a proper guide on how to manage your tags for the ultimate result in iTunes.

Sounds like you have things tagged correctly, but what do you mean by this part?

Delta Skies wrote:

The majority of these do show correctly but some are showing under Various Artists rather than in the bottom compilations section.

In any case, check your iTunes settings under "View/ Column Browser/ Group Compilations" and "(same)/Use Album Artists". Maybe alter those settings to see if that changes things to your liking.

Also, verify that you have "Keep iTunes Media folder organized selected. If not, perhaps what used to be Compilations had that flag removed, but the songs remained in the compilations folder?

Forcing iTunes to re-read the tag info, by adding and then removing dummy characters, generally fixes this. But you might also try toggling the Compilation setting OFF/ON for these albums to see if they re-group correctly.

Another thing to look at is the Sort Album field. Take a look at this thread, if you have not seen it already, where "turingtest2" recommends checking this:

How do I sort compilations in iTunes 12?

Delta Skies wrote:

I can't see where to do this?

My mistake, you only see the "View/ Column Browser/ Group Compilations" and "(same)/Use Album Artists" options while in Song view, sounds like you're in Album view. But you ought to flip over to Song view and add the Sort Album column (and maybe others) to verify consistency across these compilations.

I had the issue where I have a set of Albums that are a part of a series but all have a different subtitle so I didn't want to put them together as a single album and lose that subtitle. One of the albums had the same "Artist" for the album, so it was grouped by the artist and not with the others under the "Compilations" section. This is caused as the Artist is the same on all songs despite the checkbox for Compilation being checked as it is only evaluated if things above it in the list are different. iTunes does not have anything I could find to change how it evaluates the sort order. So I started to figure out a work around for the situation. This behavior is 100% by design with Apple's coding.

As my workaround to resolve this issue of Compilations (can have issues in views other than "Grid View", as most workarounds might fix one issue to cause another depending on application use) you can add a space to the end of one of the artist field for a single song provided you want the album to group under the Compilations section (it only works for the Song Artist not any of the other sort fields). Doing so will force there to be different artists (will appear to be the same because the space is invisible to the eye). This will mean as iTunes evaluates the "Song Artist" they are no longer all the same so under the rules it must no move to the Compilations section.

One negative effect that you should consider before doing this is, you will see what appears to be duplicate artists, which they technically are, in views where you are looking at the artist as well as in artist auto-fill fields such as fixing artist information for an album or song.

This extra space also explains why you might not see things grouped as you expect them to be, an extra space or different spelling is usually the reason why things do not come together as a single album (when a compilation that checkbox (dropdown must be checked or turned to yes). A simple way to check this, select more then one of your albums with the issue and then "Get Info". If they have different Artist then it is fine for it to say "mixed" however if the "Album" or "Album Artist" say "Mixed" iTunes will not group them together as they are different in the string comparison. To resolve this these two fields must be the same. This is why when changing the "Album Artist" to a different one like the ZZZ and then back again fixed the issue as you make the strings the same.

As a Software Engineer, I would say that it would be nice if they would simply modify the sort order to move the Compilation selection to be at the top of the list and if checked that it would then place it in the under the "Compilations" section, since this is how their Schema works but only if one or more of the "Song Artists" are different. By moving the checkbox to the top, it would no longer depend on the different artist being a criteria for this to happen to move it to the proper section. This would be much simpler then those of us that have many albums that fit into this criteria without us having to go in and manually make the change. This change in how it sorts internally within the program will have absolutely no effect on how the information they obtain from any service that provides Song/Album information as the Compilation field is not something that these services change. It also does not effect Album Art as this field also plays no part it that either.