Why Does iTunes Make Combining Songs Into a Single Album So Difficult?

Can anyone explain, or refer me to a website, that explains and lists in a "1,2,3" manner the illogic of the iTunes "get info" panes and why iTunes splits, combines and erases data depending upon what you put in the "get info" area. I have looked at many websites with suggestions and some work and some don't. The frustration I have is that I cannot decipher the logic of what iTunes is doing. Some comments and examples:
1. I thought it was convention when you highlight multiple anythings, and specify a change, this change is done on all highlighted things. For example, when I want to combine several songs into a single album, highlight them all and fill in information in the "get info area", sometimes it combines, sometimes it splits the songs, sometimes it erases the artwork. Even when I specify "part of a compilation".
2. Sometimes when I add "various artists", it combines the various highlighted songs but then erases the artwork.
3. One would think that when you specify any songs as "part of a compilation" that would automatically force these songs into a single album. Sometimes iTunes does, and sometime it does not.
4. Even when I think I have entered exactly the same information there apparently is something different. It has taken me up to 15 minutes first of very careful checking of spelling, spacing, etc. then just totally randomly changing something before I can get songs together.
5. Why isn't there just a very simple button that says something like: "no matter what, force the highlighted songs into a single album? Is there any way to simply and easily force songs together into a single album no matter what is in the individual "get info" areas?
Anyway, you get the idea. Surely there is some set of rules or logic that I am totally missing. Thanks.

Thanks, that was extremely helpful but unfortunately this very well laid out website confirms the fact that this is a very un-Apple-like interface that is confusing, contradictory and extremely difficult to use. Not sure if anyone from Apple reads these threads, but in the next version they need to do an extremely serious remake. I think this part of the interface must have been designed by refugees from the PC camp who somehow got hired by Apple!
Thanks again.

Similar Messages

Why does itunes separate the songs in the same album into two albums with the exact same info?

i have this album in my itunes thats shown as two, they both have the exact same info, artwork, and the files are even in the same album folder, but they just appear as two albulms. the first one has only track8 and the second one has all the other tracks? how can i fix this plz?

Sometimes iTunes does that. What I find often works is to add an "x" onto the end of all the artist and album names for the problem album, save it, then remove it again. If that doesn't work, try setting an album artist. I have also toggled problem albums as compilations even though they aren't, but some don't like using compilation.

Why does iTunes Match download songs that I skip?

I haven't seen this question posted yet, but feel free to direct me to any pertinent posts.
I've been using iTunes Match for the last couple days, and all in all I really enjoy the service. There is one issue that I've yet to see addressed on these boards yet though; why is iTunes Match downloading songs that I skip? I listen to all my music in random, so occasionally there will be a song I just don't want to hear at the moment. I assumed that if I don't listen to a song completely that it would not be downloaded to my device. Not true apparently. I was able to use about half a gig of data in a few hours just by skipping songs. Every song that was skipped, even if I didn't hear a single second of it, was downloaded (at an average size of 5-8 MB). I sincerely hope this is just a bug and not a 'feature'.
Any insight on this would be appreciated.

I have noticed this too. I filled up my phone VERY fast yesterday.
and deleting is not easy, lots of left swipe DELETE action, took a while.

Why does iTunes drop many songs from an album and will not add them back?

iTunes regularly droping songs/tracks out of albums I've previously added to my library. The files are present in the album folder, but if I delete the album from the library and add it back, it still will not include the previously dropped files. Sometimes I can add them individually using "Add Files" instead of "Add Folder". This is a real pain in the backside, since when I play any album in my library, I can't be certain that all the songs/tracks will be played.

Are you burning as mp3 CD or Audio CD?.
If mp3 CD - then iTunes may remove the .aac audio files. (Just a thought)

Can I combine or merge songs into a single album?

When I view my albums in iTunes, many are fragmented into several albums. This is especially true for albums that contain songs by several artists, like "Saturday Night Fever" but also for albums by the same artist like "Future Shock" by Herbie Hancock. the track "Rockit" appears as the single entry (track 1) for one album, and tracks 2-6 appear as a second album.
I've tried dragging and cut/pasting and can't seem to get the songs onto one album. This is especially frustrating for albums like "Saturday Night Fever" where it appears in iTunes as almost a dozen albums with one track each.
Message was edited by: lbeck

This shouldn't have been that complicated, but I had to stumble across the tick box for "is compilation"
* I have "edit/preferences.../advanced/group compilations when browsing" box checked but the individual tracks in a compilation still show up as separate albums. Didn't help
* Got joy only after fincing and checkint the compilations box in the GEt Info/Info box for each song in the compilation
Thanks for getting me on the right road. The iTunes HELP files were no help

Why does iTunes make a mess out of my TV Shows library?

I'm not really sure where to post this, as it doesn't seem like Apple pays much attention to the official Apple Support Forums, but I'll give it a go nontheless.
The thing is, as most Apple TV owners I have to rely on iTunes for handling my media library in order to get it working towards my Apple TV (currently an Apple TV 3rd Generation, Rev A) which is perfectly fine. I find iTunes to be very well organised and owning several OS X systems, only using iOS devices and everything my music library already consists of only ALAC (Apple Lossless) music tracks and I like to keep all my audio books in M4B (AAC) simply because it’s much better organized this way. As long as all the metadata is done right one can’t really complain about how iTunes is doing things other than the Windows version being rather slow when you start filling it up with content, the OS X version is vastly superior in terms of performance and overall stability but I guess that is to be expected.
I have absolutely no problems with my ALAC (Apple Lossless) music library, no matter how many tracks I add they are all there, with the correct metadata and everything. Same goes for my audio book library, the only ones being somewhat troublesome are those I’ve got in MP3 format instead of M4B (AAC) as they get automatically listed as music instead of audio books, but that’s fixed within a matter of seconds just marking them as audio book in iTunes metadata. My movie library, which used to consists of loads of self-ripped Blu-Rays encoded to MKV’s with either Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1 is now repacked into M4V / MP4 containing Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC-3) and with the help of metadata downloaded from IMDB they are all listed correctly with the correct metadata, so all is good and dandy.
But when it comes to TV-Shows things starts to get messy. We are still talking about only M4V / MP4 files containing mostly Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC-3) audio tracks, and a few containing 2.0 AAC audio tracks. The problem is iTunes is making a complete mess out of things, no matter what I do.
Some TV-shows are added and shown correctly in my iTunes library, others are just not working out at all! Take my six seasons of LOST for instance.
I tried to redo the metadata on the first six episodes of season 06, but they just won’t show no matter what I do. The weirdest thing with these episodes is that when I manually play the M4V files using iTunes, iTunes recognise them as LOST Season 02 episodes and not Season 03 episodes. So LOST Season 03 - Episode 01 which is "01. A Tale of Two Cities" is shown as LOST Season 02 - Episode 10 which is "10. The 23rd Psalm". That's quite odd, which was the reason why I went ahead and rework the metadata of these episodes just to be sure.
But still it won’t show in the iTunes library and when manually opening the M4V files with iTunes it still shown as being "10. The 23rd Psalm" instead of "01. A Tale of Two Cities". If I open the file with QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic Home Cinema they all list it as "01. A Tale of Two Cities" and not "10. The 23rd Psalm" as iTunes does. Watching the playback is making quite clear it's indeed playing back A Tale of Two Cities and not The 23rd Pslam episodes, even in iTunes.
I have no clues why iTunes is making a mess out of the first six episodes of LOST Season 03, it really doesn't make much sense as there is nothing with the M4V files, their contains or their metadata that points towards iTunes recognising it as a LOST Season 2 episode at all.
Just to confirm the metadata in iTunes I tried to remove the whole LOST series from my library and went ahead and added ONLY the first six episodes of Season 03 and nothing else. Then they are showing correctly, with the correct metadata for each and every episode.
But upon adding the rest of the bunch they disappear and suddenly iTunes starts mixing the first six episodes of Season 03 as Season 02 episodes...
As soon as I add any episode of LOST Season 02, 10-15 they seem to replace LOST Season 03, 1-6. So Season 03 is working perfectly, having all the right metadata and everything but as soon as I add LOST Season 02, Episode 10, LOST Season 03, Episode 01 starts playing as LOST Season 02, Episode 10 and then disappears from the library. Upon adding and playing back LOST Season 02, Episode 11 it replaces LOST Season 03, Episode 02 which then disappears from the library and this goes on for episode 10-15 of Season 02 which for some reason replaces episode 01-06 of Season 03.
This isn’t isolated to only LOST, same goes for a few of my House M.D season whereas iTunes is starting make a mess of things mixing metadata of Season 3 with metadata of Season 4 for no obvious reason. This is quite frustrating as this renders my Apple TV quite useless when iTunes is not capable of handling my media library correctly.
Several episodes are missing in quite a few of my various TV Shows as well, some requires me to manually open the M4V / MP4 while browsing my library for it to get listed as it’s not being added while adding the folder to my library.
This has been going on ever since iTunes 10.X, and it’s behaving like this on all my system it being Windows 7, Windows 8, OS X Mountain Lion or OS X Mavericks. Surely something has to be done in order to solve this? There is nothing wrong with my M4V / MP4 files as I’ve re-ripped them, re-encoded them, re-done their metadata and everything without any luck and consider it only happens with various TV shows and not with my music, audio book nor my movie library I see nothing pointing at it being a problem with my content but rather iTunes making it all fuzzy for no apparent reason.

Seems like I actually figured out what was going on.. When I re-do my MKV's into MP4 / M4V's applications like Subler, MKVtoMP4 and other toolkits are grabbing metadata from servers like IMDB.
Upon retrieving metadata they also grab something called "XID" which is supposedly Apple's very own iTunes specific ID or serial if you like for each specific TV show available through the iTunes Store. This seems to be causing the problems with missing episodes and episodes starting to playback as a different episode from another season.
I always wondered why House Season 04 - Episode 01 - "Alone" always got played back as House Season 03 - Episode 11 - "Words of Deeds". It was always the exact same mix-up each and every time. iTunes never seems to mix-up anything other than the same specific episodes each and every time, and all the missing episodes are always the same ones, from the same TV show, from the very same season. I always found that a bit strange as I would expect library mix-ups from iTunes to be somewhat random and not consistent like this.
So I tried to simply tried something completely random, renaming House Season 04 - Episode 01 - "Alone" into "RARW Season 11 - Episode 42 - "Come at me bro"" and House Season 03 - Episode 11 - "Words of Deeds" into "TESTING Season 04 - Episode 05 - "Testing this"" and it will still do the same, now my randomly generated metadata of "RARW Season 11 - Episode 42 - "Come at me bro"" was played back as "TESTING Season 04 - Episode 05 - "Testing this"". So it clearly had nothing to do with whatever metadata I added to the video within iTunes, it would continuously mix-up the very same episode no matter what.
So then I grab my toolkit to see what kind of information was garter from IMDB's database to see if I could spot anything weird going on? I didn't really see anything, but I noticed the XID with it's "Apple:vendor_id:2003-tt0367279" input, so even though these two episodes had different XIDs I tried to simply input my very own like "House Season 03" and "House Season 04" and then all of sudden everything worked out perfectly.
I'm not entirely sure whos to blame here. As the XID was indeed different I see no reason why iTunes should confuse one for the other in the first place, perhaps there is something fuzzy with the iTunes database or something. I don't really care though, I see no value in having the "correct" XID as long as my iTunes library is showing and playing back everything correctly so now I have just went ahead and re-done ALL my XID's of every TV Show to have their very own for each season just to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Why does iTunes make me log in every time I open it since upgrading to v.12.0.1.26 and Yosemite?

Since upgrading to itunes v. 12.0.1.26 and Yosemite (same day), iTunes has been making me log in every single time I open it.
Not only that, but it makes me log in several times, for iCloud, for iTunes match, for whatever else we do on iTunes. It gives me like five different reasons to log in, and I have to type my password in five times.
Can anyone tell me what is going on here and how to fix it? Thanks!

Back up all data before proceeding.
Launch the Keychain Access application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Keychain Access in the icon grid.
Select the login keychain from the list on the left side of the Keychain Access window. If your default keychain has a different name, select that.
If the lock icon in the top left corner of the window shows that the keychain is locked, click to unlock it. You'll be prompted for the keychain password, which is the same as your login password, unless you've changed it.
Right-click or control-click the login entry in the list. From the menu that pops up, select
          Change Settings for Keychain "login"
In the sheet that opens, uncheck both boxes, if not already unchecked.
From the menu bar, select
          Keychain Access ▹ Preferences ▹ First Aid
If the box marked
          Keep login keychain unlocked
is not checked, check it.
Select
          Keychain Access ▹ Keychain First Aid
from the menu bar and repair the keychain. Quit Keychain Access.

Why does iTunes keep sending songs to trash, even though I haven't deleted them?

There is one specific album in my itunes library that itunes (on a daily basis!) deletes 4/5 songs from. It almost always deletes the same songs, I just don't understand why this would be happening? The only time I realise is if I happen to scan through the trash before emptying.
Theres no alert regarding deletion or consolidation of files, in fact there have been times where some of these songs are on a playlist and when the playlist goes back to the start, some of these songs can't be located again, and are in the trash folder again.
I should clarify that I keep my itunes library on an external harddrive, although I don't see how this would affect it.
Has anyone else come across this problem before, and more importantly found a solution?
Thanks,
Daryl

Turns out it was firewall related. Even when I turned the firewall off and rebooted, it didn't help. I finally had to uninstall Avast antivirus, and then everything worked great.
To anyone else who has this issue with Avast and iTunes/Bonjour, I also found this thread that might be worth trying:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16897494#16897494

Why does iTunes play consecutive songs by the same artist so often?

Is there a way to stop or greatly reduce the issue in iTunes of playing consecutive songs by the same artist when playing in "shuffle" mode? There was a slide tool in preferences that allowed you to set that to "less likely" or "more likely" but that appears to be gone from iTunes now, or at least I can't find it. Not that it matters much, the problem was WORSE when they added that "tool" anyway. It was less likely before they added whatever that algorithm was. Now this happens constantly that my iPod plays 2 or 3 consecutive songs by the same artist when I am playing it in shuffle mode. I have over 3500 songs on my iPod but it will usually play only a small percentage of those before starting to repeat also. It seems to "stick" in a small area of the alphabet when in shuffle mode. Meaning, it will play artists whose names begin with say L through R and ONLY those artists, then repeat a bunch of them after playing only 20-30 songs. Everything else seems to be working fine on my iPod but this. I suspect it's the programming in iTunes but of course, I have no way to prove that and Apple being the quasi Communist gov't type that they are, I can get no answers from them on this or most questions I have. Maybe somebody here has encountered one of these issues and can offer some resolution?

I wish Apple would just remove the feature that supposedly addresses this issue. It worked better when there was no setting for this. I'm just tired of being pencil whipped by Big Brother.

When I import a commercial CD itunes will create 2 identical albums and put all of the songs except one into one album and put the other song into the other album by it self. How can I combine them all into one album and why is itunes doing this?

When I import a commerical CD Itunes will create 2 identical albums and put all of the songs except one into one album and put the other song into the second album that it created. Why is itunes doing this and what can I do to combine them into one album?

I found this to be somewhat helpful: Grouping Tracks into Albums
What I did was to put in the same name for Album Artist in every track. That seemed to do the trick (previously all those fields were empty). It seems like a lot of work for a simple thing.
iTunes knows (or should know) that these tracks were imported from one CD. So why is it relying on incomplete data from the gracenote database?

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.

Why does iTunes/iPhone 4S insist it can't find a song on my PC or my phone when it is on both? This is resulting in me being unable to use the ringtones I created from these songs, but I can still play the songs.

OK, so I'm clearly a newb. I thought if I asked a question, it would post, and now I'm being told to post a comment, so I'm asking the same question again. Sorry I sound like an idiot. I'm new to this apple/mac stuff.
Why does iTunes/iPhone 4S insist it can't find a song on my PC or my phone when it is on both? This is resulting in me being unable to use the ringtones I created from these songs, but I can still play the songs.

If you have added the ringtone file correctly to iTunes, it will appear under iTunes 'Tones' library.
If you don't find Tones library in iTunes, go to iTunes menu EDIT/PRFERENCES under GENERAL tab, check the Tones Box under Library source to display Tones library in iTunes.
iTunes accepts only m4r file as ringtone and has to be less than 40secs.

HT1911 Why does Itunes have me logging in multiple times to buy a song? Somehow, my account got disabled now. It also shows that I am logged in....?

Why does itunes have me logging in multiple times to buy a song? I can access everything else fine, but now my account is disabled for some reason although my password was entered correctly... help

I've seen a couple of other threads over the last 10 minutes posting similar problems, so it appears to have affected other people as well - the poster on the first thread has now posted again saying that it's now working for him, so you could give it another try.
Edit : your reply appeared as I was attempting to post this

Why does iTunes no longer sync all of my songs? It only syncs 125/600, despite plenty of room on my iPod Touch

Why does iTunes no longer sync all of my songs? It only syncs 125/600, despite plenty of room on my iPod Touch.

Yes I've done a reset but it made no difference.

Why does Itunes automatically change the genre of my songs?

Why does Itunes automatically change the genre of my songs? I have assigned specifit genres but they're constantly changed without me doing it. ITs annoying. Does anyone know how i can stop this?

welcome to the discussions
you may find that WMP is doing this for you.
There is a setting is WMP that means that it checks the info held in the file (and shown by itunes) against that held at Gracenote and 'updates' the info where there is any disagreement. On my copy its under the 'media library' tab.
Turn this off if its on.

Why Does iTunes Make Combining Songs Into a Single Album So Difficult?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for