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

I don't get it. When i put songs on my ipod nano it lists two album titles (the same titles) for that artist. I can't seem to fix it... thanks

Dave's Answer:

This is a pretty common problem, believe it or not, and it's muchly because of the lack of quality control at Gracenote's CD Database that programs like Apple's iTunes use to identify album and track titles, artist, and similar information for music CDs when you insert them into your computer.

Picture this scenario: the first person who every bought your CD puts it into their computer and finds that they have to manually type in the name of the album, artist, track titles, etc. Once done, why not, they submit their data to CDDB and subsequent people who rip that CD get all the data effortlessly. Nice, simple, but if the original data had errors, they can remain for years, messing up thousands of computer music fans.

Sometimes other folk fix the errors in capitalization (a common problem I find), spelling, and similar, and then submit the updated info to CDDB, which is ideal, but you can fix this yourself too.

But that's not exactly your problem. What you're seeing is when one track from a CD has somehow picked up a slightly different album title in its data than the rest of the CD. The fix is just to normalize all the tracks to have a single, unified title.

Let me show you what I mean:

Can you see the problem here? I have ripped a copy of the splendid Kate Bush CD Hounds of Love but on the top right section you can see that I have two appearances of the title, one that's "Hounds of Love" and the other that's the correct "Hounds of Love".

To fix this problem, I need to either identify the tracks with the erroneous title, or select all the tracks and re-type the album title to ensure that they're all 100% consistent.

I'll do the latter by clicking on both of these titles in the top right window (use Cmd-click to select the second album), then selecting all the individual song titles by clicking on one, then choosing Edit --> Select All. Now I see this:

Just about done. Now choose File --> Get Info and you'll see the "Multiple Song Information" window:

Here's where I can just type in the correct album title, change the Genre if I'm so inclined, rate it, add album cover artwork, adjust the volume, etc. But all I want to do is fix the title, so I'll type that in to the "Album" box, click OK and everything's now neatly fixed.

Hopefully this will help you fix your own mysterious problem, and once it's fixed in iTunes, that fix will automatically also apply to your iPod once you resync.

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Categorized: Mac OS X Help (Article 6500)
Tagged: cddb, gracenote, ipod, itunes
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Comments

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

Posted by: Steve Scherf at May 11, 2006 11:33 AM

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?

Posted by: Allen at January 22, 2007 4:56 PM

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�

Posted by: Allen at January 22, 2007 5:56 PM

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

Posted by: Mr3dguy at April 21, 2007 8:43 PM

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.

Posted by: Vibius at October 3, 2007 4:56 PM

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.

Posted by: Brandi Berry at November 30, 2007 8:53 AM

Mr3dguy THANK YOU! So very much, D x

Posted by: David Bethell at December 23, 2007 12:29 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!