How do I get itunes to comile various artists cds?

Question

I am new to the posting, so please fogive me if this has already been answered. My kids and I put a lot of compilation albums on our itunes like the Now that's what I call music-where the album is the same name, but the artists are all different. On my older version of itunes, as long as I had clicked on the album info that it was part of a compilation, it would put all of the tracks together. Now on the updated version it will seperate the tracks by artists even though the album info lists it as a compilation. How do I change this?

Answer 1

Hi,
The post I referred you to earlier tries to deal with quite a large number of potential causes for "split" albums. I've tried to keep it brief while giving sufficient detail to explain each problem and the suggested workarounds.
*One album, too many covers*
For true compilations, where each track is by a different artist, the answer is to set the compilation flag to true and enable the iTunes preference to *Group compilations when browsing.*
Expanding this rather brief statement to address your specific problem first confirm that the "Group compilations when browsing" feature is turned on. Use the menu item *Edit > Preferences* to open the Preferences dialog, select the Advanced tab and ensure there is a tick against "Group compilations when browsing" (3rd option up from the bottom). If you've added the tick, click OK to confirm the change, otherwise you can cancel.
Next confirm that you are using an "Album-friendly" view to look at your tracks. Select *View > List* to switch to the list view. If you don't have a section showing Genres, Artists & Albums use *View > Show Browser* to turn this on. Right-click on the track column headings to reveal a list of attributes that can be displayed. Click on any of the following that are not already ticked to turn them on; *Album, Album Artist, Artist, Disk Number, Track Number*. Repeat until all of these fields are shown. Click on the heading of the Album column one or more times until it reads *Album by Artist*.
For each compilation album, select it's name in the top-right browser window, then click on one of the tracks to move the focus to the Tracks pane. You can now select all the tracks of the album with CTRL-A, then open the "Get Info" dialog with CTRL-I. On the Info tab change/set the *Album Artist* to *Various Artists*. On the Options tab, set the *Part of a compilation* value to Yes. Click OK.
For the *Now That's What I Call Music Series* or other albums containing multiple discs that are displaying as multiple covers (e.g. Now That's... 61, Disc 1, Now That's... 61 Disc 2), select the tracks of each disc in turn and make sure that the correct *Disc X of Y* values are set. Then select all the tracks of all of the discs of the album and type in the overall album title to merge the albums together. Incidentally, for this series I find it much easier to use the shortened "Now ##" title as with the full title you can't tell one from another in the album section of the browser.
You should find that albums are now properly kept together in other "Album-friendly" views whether list, grid or cover flow based. Just don't expect them to stay together if you sort on columns such as Track Name, Artist, Disc No. Date Added, etc.
tt2