How to sort Itunes library

Question

Hi, Any advice? My Itunes library appears to have become disorganised. Most of my albums, especially the ones that I have ripped myself appear to have split appart so that every track shows as a separate album. Is there an easy way to get them back together again?
Phil

Answer 1

There are some 3rd party tools such as TuneUp. I've no idea how well they work, if at all, for this type of problem.
Perhaps a concrete example will make things clearer.
Select all of the Songbird albums. To do this click and drag a box around them, or click the first one then hold shift and click the last one, or if they aren't continuous click the first one then use ctrl-click to add things to the selection. Press ctrl-i to Get Info. You should get something like this:
Empty boxes mean either that different tracks have different values for that property, or that property is blank for every track, but there is no obvious way to tell.
To make my copy split up I had to add different numbers of trailing spaces to the Artist & Album values. Presumably something similar is going on for you...
Put in the correct common properties:
... and on the sorting tab put a tick against the empty text boxes to force the removal of any values those might contain on an inconsistent basis:
Click OK. This should merge everything together as one:
In rare cases iTunes will carry on displaying two or more copies of an album when the metadata is already consistent. If this happens changing the values to something else, and then back again often works. E.g. add trailing Xs, apply, then remove again:
tt2