[iTunes] Combining "orphan" songs (unknown album)

[John Kessler]

On Sep 21, 2010, at 3:10 AM, Michael Prete wrote:

> In addition to a couple of complete albums by U2, I also have a group of six songs under an album named "Unknown Album"  and another four songs under a separate "Unknown Album" album. I would like to combine all those songs into one "album". This same situation occurs for many artists.

I recently went through this and finally figured it all out. Here are some things I found that caused splits and how to join albums.

1. Make sure all the album titles are exactly the same on every track in an album. In a few cases I had hard to notice album name differences in some tracks which resulted in split albums. For instance, one title might include a lower case letter while others used an upper case letter, punctuation might be slightly different or there may be an extra space in a title. The best way to prevent this is to select all tracks in an album, get info on them and select the "Info" tab. If there is even one album title with a difference in your selection, the Album Title field will be blank. Enter a name in the "Album Name" field. That version of the name will be applied to every track.

2. Count the number of tracks in your album, then while in the previous control panel, enter that number in the second field of the "Track Number xx of xx section. The first number will be added later.

3. If you have other information that you want to be applied to all tracks in your compilation, like the year, or Disc Number, you may enter that as well. Do not enter anything in the Artist or Album Artist fields as doing so will wipe out any individual artist information that may exist for each track. These fields will typically appear to be empty for a compilation album - that is an album with different artists on each track.

4. Click OK.

5. Select only the first track on your compilation, right click and select "Get Info", then select the "Info" tab.

6. At this point you can see the Artist information. Make sure the "Album Artist" field is blank. If that field is blank on every track in your compilation, iTunes automatically lists the album artist as "Various Artists". The separate "Artist" field applies only to the track artist and can be different for each compilation track. You can modify that field now to correct errors if you want.

7. If you know the original album track number and want to maintain the original order, enter it in the first "Track Number" field. If you don't have that information, enter 1 or what ever position you want this track to appear in your compilation. 

8. Click the "Part of a compilation" check box.

9. Click the Next button at the bottom of the panel. This takes you to the next track of your compilation where you can repeat steps 6 through 9.

10. If my album contains tracks by a single artist I google for a photo of that artist and use that for the album art. I find that better then leaving the generic icon. If I'm making a compilation, I use some image that fits the theme of my compilation.

When you are done, your compilation will appear as a single album with multiple artists, with the tracks in the order you want.

John Kessler