The "Cover Flow" / "Album Artist" duplicate albums problem on the iPod

Question

Hi Guys,
I've made some research about this issue and got to some interesting conclusions.
DISCLAIMER:
1. I searched the web and found people describing this problem since 2006 till 2009 and the solution always revolved around not using the "Artist" and the "Album Artist" tags like they should be used.
2. I did a lot of testing, including re-writing the ID3 tags in different versions and formats to rule out any issues around the tags themselves.
3. If the stuff I'm going to describe is already well known than sorry about that, I just couldn't find it anywhere.
PROBLEM:
An album that has a single Album Artist and different Artists appears several times in the iPod Cover Flow although it looks just fine in iTunes.
Tagging the tracks as "Part of a Compilation" only partially solves the issue since the album will appear in the iPod Cover Flow as a Compilation showing up in the end and not together with the "Album Artist" like in iTunes and like it should.
It seems to be a simple issue around the way the iPod uses the "Album Artist" tag but it also seems to be around forever and it's strange Apple hasn't looked into it.
RESEARCH:
Since I just bought a new iPod Classic, I was again looking into this issue and now I was getting annoyed, strangely the behaviour wasn't the same for all the albums that were suffering from the problem. I found that when the Artist was a combination of, for example:
Album - AlbumX
Album Artist - ArtistX
Track 1 - ArtistX
Track 2 - ArtistX Feat. X
Track 3 - ArtistX
Track 4 - ArtistX Feat. Z
Track 10 - ArtistX Feat. XYZ
In the iPod Cover Flow I got ONLY TWO different albums, one with "ArtistX" and another one with "ArtistX Feat. X".
Well, this was very different from the normal behaviour when the artists are all completely different, in which case you get X amount of albums according to the X amount of different artist names you have.
CONCLUSION:
It seems to have something to do with the dot ".", I reached the conclusion that for Artist interpretation in the iPod when the Artist tag has a dot "." then it stops interpreting. That means that if you had a "." after the main artist name than it will show only once, like in the above example:
Album - AlbumX
Album Artist - ArtistX
Track 1 - ArtistX. <---- NOTICE THE DOT
Track 2 - ArtistX. Feat. X
Track 3 - ArtistX.
Track 4 - ArtistX. Feat. Z
Track 10 - ArtistX. Feat. XYZ
Then in the iPod Cover Flow it will show up only once as AlbumX - ArtistX.
I prefer to use the dots instead of just removing all the "Featurings and similar" since I can still see it normally if I play the track.
So, in the end, a combination like this in your "Artist" tag: "Album Artist"."Artist" would solve the problem in the iPod.
I would love for Apple to solve this issue and I hope this helps.
Has someone else noticed this or am I going crazy?
Thanks!

Answer 1

sometimes the official title of a release does include the Feat. Guest info.
Yes, but only in some (or many) cases. There seems to be no consistency here, as if Apple were paying no attention about where to put "feat. guest". And I guess most of the data in CDDB (Gracenote) still have "feat. guest" in Artist (correctly, in my opinion).
I quite agree that your workaround is the best workaround. I'm just too self-willed (obstinate?, I don't know the correct English) and don't want to pollute my Library with "wrong" data. Most of the problems would simply be solved if, just if Apple make iPods sort/group artists as iTunes do. Sorry but this is how I feel. I guess you can't help people like me. Thank you for your patience.
Anyway, we need a clear document from Apple describing what are the intended uses of various tags, and iTunes/iPods should obey this document. It seems for me that each Apple engineer is doing just what (s)he wants to do, without any guidelines.