When iTunes has Split an Album by Track Artists

I use iTunes on a PC plus load all my using first into my Logitech Media Player (ex Squeezebox Media Player). In order to get my music onto my iPhone I import the already loaded music using the Add Folder function in iTunes. The downside of this workflow is that in iTunes, the albums that have guest artists get split into multiple ‘albums’ as the load function using the Windows’ track artist as its ‘album artist’.

The downside of this splitting into multiple ‘albums’ is that your one album doesn’t play as an album on your iPhone and even worse will not load as one album onto the iPhone either. Here is an example of an album that I copied into iTunes using the add Folder option:

Using Ctrl key select the ‘albums’ that you want to merge (remember you can use the select a range by holding down Ctrl key and selecting the first and last ‘album’s to be merged).

Note – you may get a warning for selecting multiple albums:

Then right click the selection and select ‘Get Info’.

Now type into ‘Album artist’ whose album this is, in this case it is Alicia Keys, and save. The good news is that iTunes will prompt as you type so you probably won’t have to enter the whole name.

Problem solved, iTunes then pulls the album back together.

For compilation albums I use ‘Various Artists’ as the ‘Album artist’.

This post is one of a series as I work my way through “My Three Issues with iTunes”.

Thanks to Ken at the Reading Apple Store for showing me this fix.