Why does iTunes and my iPod show multiple titles for the same album?

Dave, this is just plain wrong. It is physically impossible for album names to become inconsistent in iTunes because of Gracenote. When a user identifies a CD, each and every song on that CD will be have identical album and artist names in iTunes. Gracenote only transmits *one* copy of the album and artist names, even if there are 10 tracks on the album. For the names to have gotten inconsistent in the user's collection, they either had to have obtained the tracks from some other source, like from the iTunes store (which doesn't use Gracenote to name the files), or they erroneously hand-edited the text.

I would also like to note that Gracenote has a large editorial staff spanning every continent (except maybe Antarctica, though I haven't checked lately). Their sole purpose is to correct and clean our album data, and they do a very good job of it. But with nearly 5 million albums in our database, it is not feasible for each and every album to receive personal attention. Our data is very clean, but not perfect. I am very familiar with other sources of album textual data aside from Gracenote, and I can tell you that none of them even come close to our quality, despite what they might tell you.

Steve Scherf
Gracenote co-founder

I think this article may have miss-understood the inquery or problem. I agree with the gracenote comment, it's usually someone's submission that messes up the idtag, not multiple tagging.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM with my ipod idtags, is that I have multiple artists and album titles in my menu, same tags, same songs, same album, same artists.

for example: I have three "Madlib" in my artists menu. under all three "Madlib" are three albums, all the same, with all the same songs. Basically, itunes has repeated my id tags. Can you help me out on what's going on?

I retract my earlier statement, It does seem to be a problem with the artists/album id tags. although, it's not as clearly visible in iTunes as the above example shows. what usually occurs is space(s) ex: " ", after the artist name or album name. it can often occur on the same album. It seems freedb isn't able to correct, or check for this (i guess that's why people use "_" instead of " "). I don't know how good Gracenote is at correcting these mistakes.

more info: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2598810�

Ok, I have a VERY PAINFUL fix for the "multiple artists listed on ipod" bug.

Fix: Set the "sort name" for every song by the artist to the exact same entry.

Instructions: Its painful because itunes doesn't have a multiple item info setting for sort name so you have to do each one individually.

In itunes...Click on the problem artist, click all albums, Right click the first song and click get info. Copy the artist's name from the artist box and paste it in the sort name box, then click the next button. Use your systems paste shortcut keys to paste in the sort name box of each song, clicking next after each entry. Alternatively push delete on each one if you don't want to
use the sort name entry.

If your lazy, or have a huge library with lots of affect artists then you can probably wait and see if apple releases a fix.

I'm not sure why, but having only two different entries in the sort name box (Artist name and blank) produced up to 5 different artist entries on my ipod (Probably more but I did a restore on my ipod and haven't finished syncing it yet).

and goddamit...can people stop assuming that everyone that has this bug has messy tags. kthnxbye

Easy fix for me at least.

I realized that you just open the browser, go through the genres (also a problem for me), and double click on the song. Fixes the stupid box after the name.

I see that this posting is rather old but I hope someone can find this info helpful. If your songs are not all lumped together under the same title it is b/c you have not selected compilation. In the search bar type your full albulm title. Then select all. Go to info (apple+I). In the lower left corner it will give you the option of changing all the titles to compilation. Select yes. In a few seconds you should be down to one CD insead of 18. I hope this works for others, it worked for me.

Mr3dguy THANK YOU! So very much, D x

Hi, I have a question for itunes users, I have a large bollywood collection and i have uploaded some albums to itune to see it does what I want but not..., I hope you guys have any solutions, all my albums are not by one artist, albums have multiple artist and multiple artist in one song, So al I wanted to do is that Itune to show all the songs from same album to show under one album, at this time itune shows each tracks individually as an each album.. aif any one has any solution ?? Thnx

To show all songs from the same album you need to select the check box "Part of a Compilation" this will keep albums together even if there are many different artists.

This can be found when you right click a song and select "Get Info" then select the "Info" tab it is in the bottom righthand corner.

Ok found a solution that does work for 3Gs showing multiple albums... all you need to do is go to the top right click on artist column header and show the Album Artist, you will now notice that some of the Album artist are different this is why it is showing multiple albums (or was the reason in my case) change this to Various Artist for ALL tracks re synch done.