Grouping albums by artist

Does anyone know how to group songs by album, and then by artist. Essentially I say this because of compilations. Generally I like to keep things sorted by artist. The only problem with this is the fact that I have several compilations, so sorting by artist causes things to go everywhere. I want my artists to all stay together, with the excepetion of compilations, which i also want to stay together, if that makes sense.

First of all, you can click the headers at the top of the library to sort by that column (artist, album, time, etc.). Sounds like you're doing that OK. Right-click on any header and you can select which headers show up.
If you want to group songs by artist one day and album the next, create playlists. In a playlist you can click on the number header (far left) and arrange songs exactly the way you want them to play. If you click Shuffle (X ison at the bottom left) the order will randonly shuffle. Clicking it again (note the color change) will restore the order.
Tracy

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ITunes refuses to group one video with others with the same album and artist

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A Little further clarification.....
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(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.
I don't sync music because I use music from at least 4 different computers. (manually mange music)
I use my iPad to play performance tracks for church and a local gospel group out of our church, Won4Christ.
I chose to buy the iPad because the laptop of one of the group members (dellxps running iTunes) was randomly losing and mixing up music and I wanted a more stable option that was bigger than my iPod touch.
I tried to add some data to music libraries that I previously added to my iPad, but the data only shows up when looking at the device in iTunes.
Wifi sync has not worked on either my laptop or desktop ( both running windows 7 enterprise 64 and newest iTunes) not really a big issue, but very annoying
When browsing through library playlist albums on the iPad, random artwork shows up on playlists with no artwork that you touch while dragging, and it does not go away until you change to another navigation tab and back.
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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.

Within Music Library can anyone please explain why when I select the option to sort 'Album by Artist' a number of tracks are being treated as separate albums? How can I correct this? I have tried to 'drag and drop' but that doesn't work.

Within music Library can anyone please explain why after I select the option to sort 'Album by Artist' a number of tracks are being treated as separate albums? How can I fix this? I have tried to manually correct by 'drag and drop' individual tracks but that doesn't work. My music library includes a number of repeat album artwork images simply because not all tracks are being listed under the one album making my library more difficult to use than it should. Any advise would be appreciated.

See Grouping tracks into albums.
tt2

Album by Artist Sort Column

If you are trying to sort using the ALBUM column, and it appears as
ALBUM BY ARTIST, which mine did, you will notice that compilation
albums will scatter throughout the column. The album will not be
grouped as it should be like a normal album.
here's a little nested egg i came across tonight to help.
click on the column title, where it says, ALBUM BY ARTIST (it may
read differently per user) and you'll notice the title and sort parameters
change to ALBUM BY YEAR and just plain ol' ALBUM.
worked for me and i hope it helps someone else.

Thank you Fizzlestix for posting your discovery about changing the type of sorting done in the Album column! One of the first things I noticed about v. 7 was a different column heading in my music Library ('Album by Year') and I could not get the thing to sort albums in any way that was meaningful to me. (The column header remained 'Album' in all of my playlists and continued to sort alpha order which is all that I need.) A long search in the iTunes Help didn't turn up anything helpful (not unusual).
I should have turned to this discussion forum sooner.
I have other questions now that I will soon be posting here.
Thanks again.
Roger C.

Sort album by artist or album by artist/year & compliations behavior

I am running iTunes 10.4.1.10 on Windows 7 (64-bit)
I was wondering about the behavior of sort album by artist or album by artist/year. Instead of sorting solely by artist or artist/year, it seems to take into account album artist. Is this correct? Previous versions of iTunes (iTunes 7 and iTunes 8) used only the album and artist field not album artist. Is there anyway to force it to sort solely by artist and ignore album artist?
I am wondering because I currently use the album artist field to hold information about featured artists, featured instrumentalists, conductors, alternative band names, etc and reserve the artist field to describe the more generalized album artist. For me, this organizational scheme works better because my iPod does not feature offer any access to album artist. My current solutions are to roll back to iTunes 7 or 8 or change the sort album artist field for every entry which has information in the album artist field; neither of which are long term solutions.
Finally, I would like to group compliations (musical soundtracks, movie soundtracks, etc) where the artist might differ by album but still use the sort by album by artist to organize the rest of my music using List View. Is this possible?
I really wish iTunes provided more options for sorting music.
Thanks!

Album Artist has been supported since iTunes 7 (7.1 I think) and normally takes preference over Artist when it comes to grouping tracks in iTunes. As you say the iPod Classic doesn't work quite the same way. You'll find my extensive thoughts on fixing things at http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp You might find that different vlaues of Group Compilations and Use Album Artists restore the view you were familiar with, otherwise it might be time to rethink the strategy.
If it is simply a mattter of swapping Album Artist with Artist then I can (and will) rustle up a script for that... It will end up on the list at http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/scripts.asp shortly. More complex rearrangements of properties are also possibe once you know what you want to achieve.
tt2

More than 1 Uknown Album, Uknown Artist

In my itunes i have more than 1 uknown album / uknown artist some have only 2 - 4 songs on there any ideas how to keep it in 1 picture below

This is getting silly.
I've never come across anyone who wants their music to be listed as "unknown".
StefanApple wrote:
all sort fileds are empty i think
That's not the same as "they are"! I bet they're not empty. If you try looking at more than one song at a time, when any field has different information in it, from two or more songs, what you will see is an empty field, even though it isn't.
StefanApple wrote:
i dont really want 1 album with just 1 track so its better having uknown but now uknown is starting to take all the room
Personally, I'm not convinced by your arguement, and the problem you now have is why it makes no sense to have stuff as "unknown"!
I'm guessing now - that you have lots of single songs, taken from lots of different albums and that either, you have changed the album name of those songs to "unknown" or you obtained them like that, but from an unusual source.
Regardless of any of that, you have now created a different problem for yourself; "now uknown is starting to take all the room"
You need to re think this; making albums unknown is simply causing you a problem you would never have had if you had left things as they were.
Either:
follow the steps I mentioned in my previous post - or,
put the correct information in the songs and then...
make Playlists of the single songs so that you have several songs in one playlist and no single ones
decide which songs you want to group together and make them a group using the Grouping field
Make up your own album titles and group songs that way.
But you cannot carry on as you are now.

ITunes 11: "Group Albums" feature gone?

In the previous version of iTunes (10) there was an option "Group Albums" in Grid View. When showing all the albums, this would group them according to e.g. the artist (the albums of each artist would be grouped and start on a "new line" in the grid). I couldn't find this option in the new iTunes 11, is that no longer possible?

As I have posted somewhere, I completely agree: navigate in the album view is almost impossible if the albums could not be grouped into categories (I used to do it by genre). I like the new album view, but not at the cost of loosing the hability of grouping.
Please, Apple developers, increasing usability implies to offer possibilities to a software, not remove them.

How do you isolate an album or artist in the new iTunes? (12.0) It is really frustrating when trying to listen to one album and I get the album in the list with all 1,025 other albums in my library.

How do you isolate an album or artist in the new iTunes? (12.0) It is really frustrating when trying to listen to one album and I get the album in the list with all 1,025 other albums in my library. Same with the artist.

Welcome to the  Discussion Forums
... I assumed that if I played the 1st track, it would continue to play the rest of the album (as iTunes does on my Macs and PCs),...
You assumed correctly, and it should continue to play the rest of the album in order. Does this happen to all your albums. Have you tried restarting the tv.

Imported MP3 sound and image CD Bird pics and sounds but each song is an album, so cluttering my album and artist lists. How can I keep together as one album please?

I Imported a MP3 sound and image CD Bird - Birds of Sri Lanka - via itunes on my mac, then synched content to my Iphone as a Playlist to get all the songs/pics in alpha order. BUT each of the 329 birdsongs are listing/appearing as a separate album, so cluttering my album and artist lists :0(
How can I get all the Birds of Sri Lanka songs/albums to come together as just one album please?
Do I need to delete what i have, and download again in another way? :0(
Can I move them all the songs somehow so they become ONE ALBUM :0)
Thank you
BW

OOOOhhhhhh no worries, sorted it.
In playlist Selected all songs, went into Get info and updated COMPILATION field from NO to YES.
:0)

How can I make a smart playlist sort album by artist in order of size?

I'm trying to figure out a way to make a playlist of songs I generally like from a very large library to fit on my iPod. The songs aren't rated, and I don't want to have a totally random selection chosen by a smart playlist.
I thought a good way to pare down the list would be to sort album by artist, and then filter that list in order of the size that each artist takes up. It's more important to get rid of an artist that I don't like that also hogs a lot of space than one that maybe only has one track. I figure if I could scan down the list and exclude the worst offenders, it conceivably would make the task much simpler.

I'm trying to figure out a way to make a playlist of songs I generally like from a very large library to fit on my iPod. The songs aren't rated, and I don't want to have a totally random selection chosen by a smart playlist.
I usually make two playlists.
One playlist with favorites I do want on the iPod and another smart playlist to fill the rest of the iPod. Just limit the size to th esize of the iPod minus wthe size of my iPod selection playlist.

Cover Flow & Album by Artist / Album by Year

I've been playing with V7 for a few hours now and Cover Flow seems pretty good.
I generally don't like to mess with the sort order of my 15,000 odd database: I like things to be: sorted by Artist, and within artist by album (either alphabetically or by year). Ideally with compilations at the end of the list.
I seem to be able to achieve this using using 'Album' heading - which toggles between album, album-by-artist and album-by-year.
My only 'problem' is that in the Cover Flow view, whilst the ordering is great and I can easily navigate sequentially using the cursor keys, typing a character on the keyboard jumps to the first album with that letter - not the first artist which is what I want.
Am I missing something (or perhaps just want too much without having to keep re-ordering things)?
Any ideas...?
iMac (power PC) Mac OS X (10.4.7)

It doesn't seem like it sorts by field or any particular order. It more looks like it sorts by free text, the first match, whatever it is, comes first. That means you'll have to write letters until your lettercombination forms a word/name/album etc that can be found anywhere.
Sitara

IPod Touch Duplicates Albums and Artists

Hi, I recently got a 3rd Gen iPod Touch (64gb) and have had some trouble after syncing it to my iTunes library. My old iPod never had any problems, but after syncing the iPod Touch many of the albums and some of the artists in my library appear twice.
I've checked for spaces after the names or different album artwork, but the real problem is that the albums or artists are listed twice in their entrety - every song appears twice. Is there any fix for this?

I also recently got a 3rd gen iPod Touch (32GB) and saw the same feature.
It appeared that if an album had different artists then the album was duplicated for each different artist name.
A solution which seems to work is to set the compilation to 'yes' :-as follows
Select all the tunes in the album
Get info
asks - do you want to edit information for multiple items - yes
Select Options tab
Part of compilation - set to yes
Resync

Sorting music by "Album by Artist / Year" on iPod touch (3rd gen.)

Hello there,
In my music library, I have plenty of discographies per artist (eg. Bob Dylan's, Coldplay's etc...), and am finding a bit of a pain to sort it the way I want it on my iPod.
I've synced my new iPad with iTunes and copied all the music across, and when I look through the music on the iPad and select an artist, each of their albums are ordered by the year they were released in (and this happened automatically). I find this a much better way of sorting music to how I did it previously (i.e. each album ordered alphabetically).
Now, my question: How the heck do I get my iPod touch to do this?
On iTunes, I figured out you can sort the iTunes library in this way by selecting an artist in grid view, then clicking "Album by Title" above the column with album artwork and changing it to "Album by Artist / Year", however this only works for that specific artist's albums - to get your iTunes library to sort all albums this way you seemingly have to do this for each artist. Is there any way to make my whole library sort music this way without having to do that?
Essentially, how can I get my iPod to sort music the way my iPad does?
Thanks.

Hello,
As far as I can see, you can't sort the order of music on the iPod Touch. It is always sorted alphabetically.
Maybe you can suggest that as a feature to Apple.
~Lt. Leviathan

Is there any possible way to set your itunes to just show the album name without the songs included in the album in artist view. and then be able to select the album to expand all the songs. this would be ideal as I have many albums under certain artists

I use to use windows media player. The layout was great. It would have icons (one of the album artwork inside the folder) for the artists. you could click on the artist and it would have the icons for all of the albums (similar to itunes) however it would not have all the songs included in that album listed underneath or within it. you had to click on the icon for the album to go into that particular album to view the songs. In my personal opinion this was much easier to search for a particular album especially if you had many albums under one artist as I do. I collect live concert recordings for several particular bands. It would be really nice if itunes would allow you to contract the songs names within each album under artist view and have some way to exand them or open a seperate album folder when clicking on the album name through artist view. is this even possible. does anyone know a way to allow this is happen. you would make a serious music collector very happy. I know this is a crazy request but for people who are serious music collectors like myself with over a TB of music it is much easier to consolidate each individual album under each individual artist for faster searching/viewing needs

You are describing an iTunes problem, not an iPod touch problem. Try posing in the iTunes forum.

Grouping albums by artist

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