ITunes splitting up album tracks - Annoying

Does anyone have any ideas as to how to stop iTunes splitting up tracks from the same album into 4 or 5 separate albums when all the ID3 tags are the same?
It's so frustrating and its only happening with one particular album of mine.
Thanks

Have you looked at this article in the Apple Knowledge Base?

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ITunes split my album after importing

just got my new imac with latest version of itunes.
and turned on home sharing, merged both libraries from my macbook pro and this new imac.
and most albums has been split, and i drag to think to import the entire collection all over again.
so i thought i import a brand new album into my new imac to see if is still the same, and yes, itunes split it again.
any help is much appreciated.
thanks.

This is entirely a metadata issue. I have had the problem with various imports of music. Generally, to get a full album together that has been split, you can select all the tracks of that album, then alter the metadata - there are many ways to use the 'get info' metadata editor to bring all the tracks together for a particular selection.
As suggested above, checking the compilation box can work in many cases - I prefer that only for compilation albums because I use the iTunes keep media folder organized option.
Also, as mentioned above, setting an album artist - as different than what may be in the song artist for individual tracks - can work.
Also, if an album has more than one CD, then you can use the disc number, 1 of 2 then 2 of 2, and so on, to further refine how iTunes lists your music collection.
Another trick I have used is to set the album artist as 'Various' - if you do that, then you don't need the compilations box checked, but iTunes will create a new artist called various, and put the music so designated there.
Most of the things you can do that will help are in the 'get info' - info window, but sometimes it helps to use the 'get info' - sorting window.
Also, sometimes you find metadata that you want to delete in various fields as you work through the metadata of your collection.
Unfortunately, there is probably not much you can do with the entire library at once in this regard that keeps iTunes music folders organized nicely. But there is the unlikely possibility that, if you are viewing your entire library, say in list view, you may have selected a header that causes the albums to be split - set to view as list, highlight 'album' (as opposed to album by artist or artist/year) - then scroll though fixing any split albums as you go, using the method of selecting the album tracks, get info, and adjusting the metadata as you prefer for each album. It is a process, but it is also thoughrough.
There are some free scripts you may want to download that will do some helpful batch processing
I have made much use of - hubi's iTunes scripts - the download page isn't English, but the script download is easy to find, just click the following link and scroll till you see
hubi's iTunes scripts
the read me instructions and script list are in English
hubi's scripts work for batch selections of tracks - so if you import an album and find the metadata screwed up somehow, you can select the whole set of screwed up tags at once (even across a series of albums), run the easy to use script, and watch it all be fixed automatically while you sit back and relax... I would advise running a script on a small test selection of tracks first - just to get used to and familiar with how it works and to see that does what you intend - I haven't had any problems with the ones I used.
http://hubionmac.com/wordpress/category/softwareschmiede/applescripting/itunes/
there are other useful scripts out there, like Doug's Scripts
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=itunestrackcpr
Anyway, I hope all that helps.
just for reference, here is a sampling of what some of hubi's scripts can do...
01-(un)capitalizes
01-(un)capitalizes
This script changes.... THIS TEXT into This Text... or this text
01-Delete spaces
Sometimes invisible blanks are behind an artist name or album name...this script deletes these blanks behind or infront of the strings
01-Delete x first-last chars. of Title
A Name like "01--Ray Of Light" will be changed to "Ray Of Light" and the01 will be entered in the tracks tracknumber id3 field =)
01-fix combined Artist-Title
Sometimes Tracknames look like:
"Madonna---Ray of Light" and in the artist field you see something like"Ripped by Me"... this script puts Madonna back to the right field... all youhave to do is to enter the right delimiter ("---" in this case)
01-switch Artist<->Title...
Switch ID3 field a with ID3 field b (not only Artist with Title any more =)!
01-z_filename ->Title
Sets the ID3 field Title to the track's filename)
01-z_trackNr-Filename->ID3
When a track's filename look like "01-Madonna-Ray of Light.mp3" andyou don't have the track's tracknumber stored in the ID3 Tag... this Scriptcan do this for your =)

Itunes split an album into separate pieces

I tunes split an album into 4 pieces. I was able to consolidate it down to 2 pieces by ensuring the spelling and spacing was all the same in the title and artist spaces.
However, now that everything is exactly the same, it still won't consolidate to one album. Shouldn't there be a way of manually putting the songs into one album?

"Shouldn't there be a way of manually putting the songs into one album?"
Yes, there should - but unfortunately there isn't. iTunes doesn't have an object that represents "one album" - it uses the metadata associated with individual tracks to group them into albums in appropriate UI views. As tt2 says, having identical values for Album and Album Artist (or Artist, where this is genuinely the same for all tracks, and Album Artist is left blank) will group albums correctly. Possible remedies, having selected all the tracks that should be part of the album:
re-enter the Album and either Artist or Album Artist as appropriate, putting a "dummy" character like "x" before the propert values. This should eliminate any possible conflicts caused by stray spaces/non printing characters. This should group the tracks correctly - you can then remove the "dummy" characters.
if this doesn't work, it may be worth setting the "Part of a compilation flag" - if this then groups the tracks correctly then unset it again ... there's no reason why this should work but I have found this to be the case in recent iTunes builds.
If the problem persists post some screenshots showing the details of the problem ... that may help to diagnose and resolve the issue.

ITunes lists my album tracks backwards

I'm using iTunes 7 on my new 24" iMac but I noticed it lists my album tracks backwards. For example, when I go to the middle Album view, it lists all of my albums with all of the tracks in that album, but they are numbered last to first as you read top to bottom. This not only looks weird, but it prevents me from playing a whole album continuously from beginning to end. Thanks for any help you can give me.

Hi, Ixnayx51.
Have you tried clicking the Track # column heading to assure the tracks are in ascending order by track number? Likewise, in Album View, clicking the Album column heading label repeatedly will put all albums in ascending order by album and related fields, as well as by track number within album.
If the Track # column is not displayed, Control-click any column heading and select it from the resulting contextual menu.
FYI: iTunes questions should be posted on the iTunes Discussion.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

How do I stop my iTunes splitting an album?

I know that this has been asked before, but I cannot find a solution.
I have just updated my phone and iTunes, but some of my albums have been split across their artists. I have tried updating the compilation data, but this hasn't worked. Can anyone advise on a functioning solution?
Thanks in advance.

Hi,
I've got the same problem on my iPhone 6 after upgrading to 8.3. The music app started to mess up my albums by replicating the albums up to 18 times for the very worst one. Mostly they are just duplicated. But it also doesn't happen to all. Well, replicate and duplicate are actually not the right words. They've got split in a very abstract way. Like the first one contains nearly everything but song 3, 7, 9, 17 & 22, which are grouped to the second album with same name and cover. Or in another one it's a sequentially ordered snip of the album from song 3 to 10. And it's mostly compilations. But also here, not all of them and not only compilations. And NO, it's not a problem with iTunes on my Mac. All albums are looking perfectly fine in there! But doing a full sync from iTunes to the phone doesn't help either.
And now make a guess what happened on my iPad after the update... bingo, the same. But it would be probably to simple if it would affect the same albums as on my iPhone, right? Some of them are the same, but it does actually seem to be coincidence.
All of them have been purchased through the iTunes store and interestingly when I delete them from the device and then enable the "show all music" button in the music settings to see also all icloud music which is not downloaded to the device, it's still the same. Also the cloud side album is split the same way! Downloading it again doesn't change anything. This is really annoying and I would appreciate a solution which doesn't mean to completely reset my devices.

ITunes's playing albums' tracks backwards

Namely, the problem as in the subject of this thread. It occurred after I updated to the latest version of iTunes. How do I make it to play it in normal order?
Thanks for your advices.

Or is it a bug? When clicking on "forward" from the iTunes menu ("navigation") it goes backward and vice versa. It's strange and I could't find a solution browsing in the Help section of the menu. Am I right?
P.S. After some experimenting I noticed, however, that if I click on "play album" then the playback goes in the right order (by tracks' numbers), but if I choose to play from some song in an album, then this thing happens. It's kinda annoying, though

ITunes/iPod displays album tracks out of order

I have this weird problem where one of my albums has three tracks that display out of order.
http://i55.tinypic.com/mtwf0x.png
I can't think of anything in the tags that would cause this. They're all identical in terms of album/artist/# of tracks...
But this causes a wierd problem with another album
http://i55.tinypic.com/xmvh2e.png
The three out of place tracks go there when I order by album. On my iPod in album view, Black Symphony gets displayed in the Bs, but then in the Hs, it'll show up as a full listing again like this:
Heart of Everything
Black Symphony
Heart of Everything
Black Symphony
Heart of Everything
Black Symphony
Going into each album will have the full list. Heart of Everything displays its tracks in order, but each entry for Black Symphony will have the full listing with tracks 9, 15 and 21 at the bottom of the track list.
Any idea what would cause this issue?

Holy frigging crap that was it! I didn't even think to look under the sorting tab! No idea how that got set anyway since they're all from the iTunes store. Anyway, apart from those three tracks, Black Symphony had the Sort Album field empty. I cleared it on those three tracks and everything is normal now. Thank you!

Why is iTunes splitting my albums songs up into multiple albums

i have ticked the box for varies artists and in the sorting tab i have even done cd1 and cd2 but they are still showing up as albums.

Hi, trucker2006.
Thank you for visiting Apple Support Communities.
I understand that music you are importing is not grouped together in iTunes. Here are some steps that will help you with this.
Why aren't songs with the same album art grouped together?
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1468
Cheers,
Jason H.

When importing a cd it splits the album into separate individual tracks instead of 1 album with numerouse tracks - how do I get them all together

When I import a CD from the Apple Mac drive it splits the cd into numerous single tracks in itunes instead of 1 album with all the tracks. How can I get it to import to the one place. I did try importing the same cd on a friends apple mac to see if it did the same thing and it imported the cd as 1 album with all tracks in there so I can't understand why it's separating them all.

This happens mostly when you import a compilation or a CD that is not noted in the Gracenote Database.
How to change back in one Album:
Mark all titles of that album (shift or cmd click)
Right click and choose "Get info"
Fill in the wanted name in "Album" and "Album Artist*"
Drag&Drop the wanted Album Art to the little window down right in that pane.
iTunes group and sort albums by that two entry's in the info pane. If the CD is not listed in the database but the titels, iTunes split the album to fit the titles to eventually matching albums of the artists.
Cheers - Lupunus
* If you import a compilation, choose "various artits" for the Album Artist field.
Message was edited by: lupunus

Itunes splits my CD album import into 4 folders instead of 1?

I tried to import a CD album from my collection into itunes but instead of there being just 1 folder, itunes had broken the album down into 4 folders (1 folder with 10 of the albums tracks and the remaining 3 in individual folders); this results in itunes displaying 4 album covers for 1 album. Could you advise how to get around the problem? I've tried deleting the imported files and repeating the 'import' process but the same issue arises.

itunes does this when the CDDB Gracenote database has the CD listed as a Compilation.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA26495
BEFORE you import the CD again, Get Info on all the tracks in the CD area.
Right-click > Get Info and go to the Options tab.
Uncheck the Compilations box, then import.
Tell itunes to replace the copy you have now.
Here is more info on that.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1468
Message was edited by: Katrina S.

How can I get iTunes to display the tracks from a CD in their original (album) order?

To be absolutely honest, I don't really understand what this box is for, so I shall just use it to repeat and expand on my question. (I have already sent a "Feedback" comment on the same topic).
How can I get iTunes to display the tracks from a CD in their original (album) order?
It seems to me that there is something very basic wrong with the way iTunes handles CD Tracks.
Professionally produced CD tracks are seldom if ever in a randomised order. Why then does iTunes seem unable to display the tracks in the order they appear on the original CD source - whether from a personally owned CD or from a download from the iTunes Store?
Some music demands a specific, non-alphabetic sequence in order to make sense. Why does it seem that iTunes only offers Alphabetic, or reverse alphabetic order - both of which make a nonsense of the original, often intended order of tracks?
Why not replace the so-called "cover-art" in the bottom left hand corner if the iTunes window - which, while it may look attractive to some, gives the barest of information concerning the original disc, with a list of the original CD tracks in their original order, so that the user can easily reestablish the order in which they should be played.
As I would expect legibility might be a problem with doing this, why could not the original contents, (in their original order), at least, be displayed when the "cover art" is double clicked-on - the result of which at present gives me an enlarged version of the "Cover Art". While on the subject of the contents of the source disc, what about all the album notes which someone takes trouble to write in order to increase the appreciation of the music on the CD and the listener's general background knowledge of the artists involved. Such notes, it seems to me, have considerable intrinsic value in their own account. I would, I think, normally be prepared to buy such "Sleeve notes" - so long as a "taster" was supplied (as it is for the music) - for something like the cost of a single 'Tune" on iTunes.
These two aspects let Apple iTunes down enormously, in my opinion. I think that by chopping even quite protracted sequences of music up into bits does no one any favours - except perhaps Apple's already quite substantial bank balance. People have to be aware that two and a half, to three and a half minutes is a very short time to develop a piece of worthwhile music, and that there are many, many composers, not all of whom are alive today who have written music that huge masses of mankind value for the enrichment of their lives and the human condition in general.
Please make the viewing of iTunes tracks in their correct order by default possible. By all means have the alphabetical variations available as offering a different approach to the music, but not the sole approach to it - PLEASE.
Frustratedly yours
Alan Whitaker
PS I work at my old 24" iMac Intel Core 2 machine which runs OS "Tiger" - because it is more beautiful to look at, the screen is more pleasant to work on, and because, in some ways it is more capable (it will run FreeHand MX without needing a "patch"), than my more recent 21.5" which runs "Snow Leopard". (I don't find it that much slower, either).

Dear Mike
Thanks for the support. I am utterly amazed that after all the hype about how good iTunes is that it cannot play a downloaded CD in the correct order, and that what that order should be is not available directly from within one's own iTunes installation. (I know that one can go back to the iTunes Store to check what the order should be, but having downloaded the tracks surely iTunes is clever enough to retrieve this important information.
My iTunes to differ from yours in that I have also noticed that it seems unable to download copies of my "talking books" in the correct order either. But in my case it downloads them - from a CD - in order, but with the first track downloaded first - so that it appears at the bottom of the column of tracks so that it would get played last! (At least this is, while being inexplicable, a relatively "logical" bit of blundering and because of this is relatively easy to put right!).
I like many genres of music, some of which are not really programmed except perhaps by the artist performing them. I know that Frank Sinatra was very careful to programme his album songs to obtain a particular effect and in relation to the keys of the music. iTunes presumes to know better.
Film scores may be totally randomly put together, in some cases, but in others the order is vital to one's appreciation of the music as a whole and how it relates to the plot of the film.
In symphonic music most works are divided into sections and are conceived by the composer that way. Some individual sections may gain a life of their own if played separately, but they are never complete in the sense that the composer envisaged them without being placed in their proper context.
Opera and probably most choral music too, is similar except that the words may well become meaningless if the order is changed at the whim of a piece of ill-written computer code, while ballet music has to be heard totally within its sequential context or it becomes meaningless.
Finally, I would venture that iTunes, by jumbling up the order of the tracks as recorded on a CD, does an immense disservice, not only to the music on a particular CD, but to music in general, by expressing everything in terms of "Songs" - which it seems to interpret as stand-alone items of between 2 and 4 minutes whatever the genre. Even the way the iTunes publicity speaks of how many "songs" it can store instead of how many minutes or hours of recorded sound. This has to be another brick in the wall of "dumming-down" of people's expectations, and the shortening of their attention spans.
I don't know about anyone else, but I feel betrayed by Apple over this. Perhaps the look, feel and general presentation of an item are not the most desirable features of a consumer product. Maybe it should be judged more on it fitness for the purpose for which it was sold. There is one other possibility - that Apple are trying to redefine "Music" - and that everything that lasts longer than about 3.5 minutes or is in the form of what could for want of a better term be called symphonic in the broadest sense is something else - not "Music" within Apple's new definition, at all!
Well that's off my chest! now I can get down to creating some sort of order in my iTunes Libraries, knowing that I have to reconsult all the sources in order to confirm the source playing order.
Anyway thanks again. At least I know that it is not just me
alanfromthatcham

When I download a long album from ITunes containing like 20-30 tracks, why does ITunes sometimes segregate one track and create a separate album out of it. I can merge the track into the other tracks on a playlist, but I can not merge the 2 albums.

When I download an opera album with lets day 40 songs (tracks). Why does iTunes create one album of tracks lets say 1 through 22, skip 23 and then 24 through 40. Then a separate album with track 23 is created. I can merge them together in a playlist but not as a single album. I go into the info under the file menu for each and make sure the information is the same but they still will not merge.

I'm not sure why this happens, but I found a workaround. Below the album title it will list the artist(s). The issue seems to happen when there are multiple artists. For example, an Album titled "Over the Sea to Skye" has The Chieftains and James Galway as artists. Some tracks (for whatever reason) will list only one of these and result in the playlist showing what appears to be multiple albums. You can click on the artists and it will highlight. Paste in what is appearing on the other "albums" and it will then show as one:
Hope that is somewhat clear enough to help. Doesn't fix whatever the issue is but it is a workaround. For me this is only happening with CD's that I have imported.

Some of my downloaded albums tracks have been stored in my iTunes library in separate places, how do I complie them into a complete album?

Some of my downloaded album tracks have been stored in my iTunes library in separate places, how do I compile them together to form a complete album?

Generally all you need to do is fill in an appropriate Album Artist. For more details see my article on Grouping Tracks Into Albums, in particular the topic One album, too many covers.
tt2

HT1399 When I import a CD to itunes, it splits the album in to multiple entries. I have changed the info on some but others just will not merge. Is there an easy way to do this and can I stop them from splitting in future? Thanks

When I import a CD to itunes, it splits the album in to multiple entries. I have changed the info on some but others just will not merge. Is there an easy way to do this and can I stop them from splitting in future? Thanks

Okay this is what fixed my problem. Some kind of error/glitch occured half-way through importing that third cd that prevented further imports from any other cd. Once I completely removed the half-imported cd album from my library I could further import cd's without any problems.

TS1389 I've purchased an album through the itunes store and every track plays except one which continually asks me to authorise my computer. I've tried all the steps suggested above but still no joy. Anyone have any ideas what i can do next? Thanks Pa

I've purchased an album through the itunes store and every track plays except one which continually asks me to authorise my computer. I've tried all the steps suggested above but still no joy. Anyone have any ideas what i can do next? Thanks Paul

Sounds like you have a "damaged track" or "damaged file".
This worked for me today downloading Kendrick Lamar's new Album "good kid, m.A.A.d city".
My situation: I bought the album today for my Mac, MacBook Pro, iPad 2, and iPhone 4S devices.
Issue: One song (only on my MacBook Pro) would not play, instead display "
EX: left"
Solution: 1. Manually delete the song (giving you the error) permantly from the authorized computer.
2. Open iTunes, Click iTunes Store (left sidebar), and locate Quick Links and then click Purchased to proceed.
3. Click "Not On This Computer", find the song that wouldn't play, and re-download it again.
4. Check your Music Library for your song (Should download inside the associated album) and hit play.
EX: (Song I purchased that wouldn't play because of authorization, playing)
Enjoy!

ITunes splitting up album tracks - Annoying

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