Browse Albums by Artist problem

? Hello everyone, I've had a quick search and couldn't find the answer so here goes. I have a Zen 32GB player which I only use for music. All of my albums are sync'd with WMP without any problem, however.... when browsing on the player, if i search by aritist and then by album I find that the album does not contain all the tracks. This happens where another artist has contributed on the track, or if the track is a cover version. Is there a way I can browse albums by artist properly (i.e. they way anyone would search for an album in the real world)?and see all the tracks correctly?Its really infuriating.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Happy Christmas!

I think this will all come down to the tags. I've never seen a technical discussion of exactly which tags the Zen pays attention to and how it resolves ambiguities (say when there is both an "Album Artist" and "Artist" tag).
You can probably work out a decent hypothesis on your own by comparing the tags of songs that end up in the album vs ones that drop off. How are the multiple artists encoded in the tags? For MP3 tags the character forward-slash ( "/" ) gets special treatment as a magic field separator in some tags (which at times can be awkward). I don't know if the Zen honors that, though.

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ITunes sort 'Album by artist/year' problems

I've been having problems sorting _some_ albums. I'll give you a specific example:
I rip Simon and Garfunkel's 'The Concert in Central Park' which has 19 tracks. I want them to play in continuous mode, and in order.
I show track number in the columns, make sure all the tracks are of the same album and artist and I don't specify and sort options.
Now I click on the column header 'Album by Artist/Year' and I see that track 16 is first followed by 18, 19 then 1,2,3, etc.
I'm not sure why 16,18 and 19 are out of order, but they are and I don't know what other field it is using to apply this sort order since I've turned off the sort fields. I should say that I think the sort fields are turned off since I selected all tracks, hit command-I and made sure that the artist and album are the same, then went over to the sorting tab and selected each checkbox and made sure that the field was blank. Clicked on OK, then went into each track one at a time and verified that the general info and sort info were as I specified.
If I change the sort column to be just 'Album' then it sorts correctly - I think that the year is messed up, so I add the year column to the display and see that it is 1982. I click on the year and the sort is just fine. I set it back to 'Album by Artist/Year' and the same bizzare sort shows up. The same mis-sort shows with 'Album by Artist' so I do a check on the artist name (even looking for leading or trailing spaces - nothing).
I could probably delete the album and re-rip it, but I would rather find out why the sort is messed up so I can correct this problem if/when it shows up again. I'm aware that I have a few other albums with similar problems.
Thanks,
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Reply to my own question.
In the sidebar a similar question was asked (if I could learn how to post the right question in the first place I probably would have found it).
I reset the disc number then the tracks showed up in the correct sort order. I'm pretty sure that the tracks had disc number 1 of 1 before, now they just have _ of _ (blank of blank).

Windows 7, Itunes 10.3.1.55. "iTunes is unable to browse album covers on this computer".

I just built a new Computer and sucessfully moved my iTunes Library and music over (Windows 7, Itunes 10.3.1.55). I am getting a message on the cover flow view that states, "iTunes is unable to browse album covers on this computer". This Cover Art is showing in all other views, so it is there. I upgraded QuickTime and even install Safari. This did not work. I have a very large music collection and prefer the coverflow navigation. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

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When browsing artists (Ctrl+B) in iTunes, "Jay-Z" and "Jay-Z Ft. MJB" sort different, even thought they both have the same album artist. When selecting "Jay-Z Ft. MJB" only one song appears.
So I tried entering Jay-Z as "Sort Artist" for all songs in album. But as "Jay-Z Ft. MJB" is the artist for the first song on the album, all songs by Jay-Z sort as "Jay-Z Ft. MJB" in the browser (Ctrl+B).
Why?

Ah, you've hit upon a problem with iTunes' sorting, although not really iTunes fault.
If you have tracks with different artists but all with the same Sort Artist, iTunes cannot reliably know which of those Artists ought to appear as the Artist name in the browser. So it uses the Artist tag of the first track (with this Sort Artist) that was added to the Library, which is not always correct.
So in your situation, drag the first track out onto the desktop and delete it from iTunes completely (select move file to Trash). You will now see that the browser displays the Artist name you want. Then drag that track back from the desktop and it will be added to the Library and be a part of that album again, but as it was added later, the browser does not use its Artist tag and still uses the Artist name from the other (now earlier) tracks.
Sometimes when there's lots of different artists on the tracks of an album (but it's not a compilation) you may have to delete several tracks and re-add them in this way to get everything the way you want, but in my experience, it does then stick, i.e. it doesn't forget and start using one of the other Artist names for browser display. Of course, Apple may change iTunes...

Browser Shows Wrong Artist

Here's the situation:
I am using the Sort Artist field to combine similar artists within the iTunes Browser view. My problem shows up nicely in the following situation: I have two albums with Artist set to "Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers". I have three albums with Artist set to "Tom Petty". I want them all to appear in the iTunes Browser under one Artist entry: Tom Petty.
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I then go to the last remaining 'Heartbreakers' album and do the same thing. Now, however, I no longer have a "Tom Petty" entry in my browser. The entry reads "Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers", even though all of the albums under that artist have their Sort Artist field set to "Tom Petty".
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Jason

I have the same problem. I wish there was a place to submit to a bug report.
My best guess is that this naming behavior is a shortcut leftover from the time when iTunes didn't have 'Sort by Artist.' At that time, there could only be one artist per browser entry, so it was safe to simply display the artist of the first track. Now, since the first track in the category 'Tom Petty' is actually by 'Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' (in your case), the old heuristic pulls that name for the name of the browser entry. They simply need to change the rule so that it displays the 'Sort Artist.'

(ios5 ipad bugs)I can't get changes of album art, artist, album and other tags to show up in the iPad music player, but they show up correctly in the iTunes device view. Certain random songs do not sync correctly. Wifi sync hasn't worked yet.

(ios5 ipad bugs)I can't get changes of album art, artist, album and other tags to show up in the iPad music player, but they show up correctly in the iTunes device view. Certain random songs do not sync correctly. Wifi sync hasn't worked yet.
I mostly use technology for education and professional audiovisuals and lights.
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Thank you for actually making it to the end of this manuscript of annoyances.

Just wondered if anyone had any other suggestions.

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I have the same issue. Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but I was on the Cover Flow View and it was working fine. I clicked on the full screen icon and the entire screen went random (meaning totally random pixels of color all over). I pressed the escape key and the normal screen returned, but it only showed a black section where the covers had previously been. I restarted iTunes and it started giving me the same message. I also can see them in the lower left and on the Album View. Just the Cover Flow view doesn't work. I downloaded the latest iTunes today and I keep all of the Windows updates on.

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I also recently got a 3rd gen iPod Touch (32GB) and saw the same feature.
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1) Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings
2) Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Content and Settings
3) Manually deleting all music content, resetting iPad, reimporting music to iPad
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You are describing an iTunes problem, not an iPod touch problem. Try posing in the iTunes forum.

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dannycorker wrote:
It appears they are, although I refuse to believe this is the accepted behaviour - has no one else complained about this?
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Accept it as it is.
Change the year for the documentary to the same year as the album and simply kid yourself that it's the correct year. (I'm not being flippant, but if the documentary is all footage from album release year, then "technically", the doumentary is from that 60's year.)
Leave the year of the documentary track blank, but put the year (2010) into the track's "Comments" field instead.
Propose a workable solution to Apple via Apple Feedback. (I am being a bit flippant now. Sorry, but you'll be in for a long wait before anything might change.)
Get Gracenote to change their text fields, get the people who input the information into Gracenote to do so correctly and then get Apple to change iTunes to recognise those changes. (Now I am being very flippant. Good luck with this one!) Oh! And hope Apple never decide to change from Gracenote to someone else!
Number 2 or 3 are probably your best bet.

Sorting albums by artist then year

I have a bunch of albums imported into my itunes but I have problems sorting them the way I want it.
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Click on the Album column header. It will change to Album by Artist, then Album by Year.
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How disappointing!

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Hi,
I have an iPhone 5 with iOS 8.02 and latest release of Spotify installed. Since the upgrade, my available offline music does not show up in OFFLINE MODE under Albums or Artists. I see everything in Songs but the Albums screen just shows the loading screen and under Artists everything is blank.
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I got spotify premium just a few ago and i never realized, that all my music are completly avaliable in the songs tab.
I found out, that some of the albums, i used to download for offline mode, are not "avaliable" (3 dots loading screen, or completly blank) while others can be played normaly through the album tab.
Also sometimes the album or the artist tab is completly blank and not avaliable during offline mode.
I also found out that restarting the iOS device can help spotify loading different albums, but about the half of the music in the album tab is still unavaliable.
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I apologize for grammer mistakes, english isnt my native language.
Edit: I just found out, that the pc (windows 7 64gb) version of spotify gets the same problem sometimes, so not only iOS users got this problem.

Browse Albums by Artist problem

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