iPad confuses songs with albums

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I have many albums in iTunes. An album can include anything from three to two dozen songs. When my iPad synchs to iTunes on my MacBook, it gets all of the songs OK, but it frequently displays an individual song as if it were a complete album. The result is that when I go into Album display, I see hundreds of "albums," but most of them are individual songs that should really be inside a much small number of albums. Any idea why this should happen?
 
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chas_m

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In iTunes, try getting info on a set of songs that SHOULD all be part of the same album, but don't appear that way on the iPad.

If you batch-selected songs that should go together as an album, and the fields "Artist," "Album" or "Album Artist" is BLANK, that means there are inconsistencies in how one of those fields is spelled on one or more songs. Change it to be consistent and that will fix the issue.
 

bobtomay

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^^^^ the above, plus:

If you have 100 individual songs and that's the only song from 100 different albums - if each of those have the album title of the album they're from, then they're going to appear as individual albums.
 
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This helped for some albums but not others. I was able to fix a few of the "albums," by making sure that track and disk fields were completely filled in (track 1 of 13, 2 of 13, etc., and disk 1 of 2 etc.). The problem seems to emerge when each track has a different artist, even though the album title and the other fields are identical on every track.

Any other ideas?
 
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To chas_m - I am satisfied that you diagnosed the problem correctly when I examined two "albums" that should have been one. The real album had 8 tracks. Album 1 in iTunes contained tracks 1-7, and Album 2 in iTunes had track 8. The only difference was that in tracks 1-7 the album artist field was blank, while in track 8 it had the name of the actual artist. As soon as I blanked that out, iTunes recognized it as a single album and it synched perfectly to iPad.

Problem is: in my other "Albums" that should be single albums different tracks really do have different artists. Think of a Sinatra album where Frank is track 1, Nancy is track 2, and some of his friends are tracks 3 etc. If I want this all to register as a single album in iTunes, I have to delete the album artist field. Evidently iTunes uses this as part of its algorithm in deciding what songs make up an album. Maybe I don't understand the purpose of the album artist field.
 
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chas_m

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iTunes sorts files (internally) based on Artist, specifically Album Artist, then Album.

So, if you have a sampler album (let's say) where the artists are all different, you need to a) make sure the album name is consistent and b) use something like "Various" or "Frank Sinatra and Friends" as the Album Artist. Only THEN can the "Artist" tag be whatever the artist actually is and yet the songs will "stick together."
 

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