[.Neo]

I recently bought an iPod classic. It's been great so far, but I'm experiencing some problems with Cover Flow: Many albums appear more than once and it basically only affects the ones with more than one artist like this:

CD A
1 Artist A
2 Artist A featuring B
3 Artist A featuring C
4 Artist A
5 Artist A

or

CD B
1 Artist A
2 Artist B
3 Artist C
4 Artist D
5 Artist E

The first example would generate three separate Cover Flow covers, while the second will show five.

So my question is: Is there any way to fix this (in iTunes?) so the iPod classic's Cover Flow menu will recognize albums with multiple artist as one whole album, showing only one cover? Of course, I'd like to do so without giving all songs the same artist name.

[analogika]

Does it do this in iTunes as well?

[rjenkinson]

Turn on the compilation setting for the album.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by rjenkinson 

Turn on the compilation setting for the album.

That would sort it under Compilations though.

Enter the proper album artist - e.g. if you've got, say, William Shatner's "Has Been", and every other song features somebody different as artist, then enter "William Shatner" as the album artist, and that's where it will be sorted - no need for the "Compilation" tag anymore (better reserve that for actual compilation albums).

Having no experience with the new iPods, I don't know if they might have a bug in this regard (I know CoverFlow in iTunes sometimes does weird things even if all the settings are right) - which is why I asked if the problem shows up in iTunes as well.

[.Neo]

Nope that's the weird part. For example the CD Rhythms Del Mundo: Cuba appears twelve times in the iPod Cover Flow list, yet only once in iTunes' Cover Flow/grouped with artwork mode view.



In most cases the CDs are already set as compilation, so that doesn't make any difference either.

[analogika]

I'd consider it a bug, then.

Apple have been tweaking this stuff in iTunes as well, over the past few releases, so I'd chalk up the discrepancy to an upcoming feature fix release.

[zerock]

did you use the Album Artist field?

[analogika]

Originally Posted by zerock 

did you use the Album Artist field?

That wouldn't explain a discrepancy between iTunes and the iPod, would it?

[rjenkinson]

The discrepancy may be due to browsing by artist on the iPod and by album in iTunes.

[.Neo]

Originally Posted by rjenkinson 

The discrepancy may be due to browsing by artist on the iPod and by album in iTunes.

That could be the problem yeah. It's really annoying to be honest and it makes Cover Flow practically impossible to use.

Overal I think iTunes handles CDs with more than one artist poorly in Grouped with artwork view. The only way to make the tracks of one CD stick together while maintaining the correct track order (1, 2,3,4 and not 2,4,1,3) is to sort them by Album, rather than Album Artist or whatever.

In any case it would be nice to see this fixed.

[analogika]

Need. More. CoverFlow. Preferences. On. iPod.

Hm.

[.Neo]

Apple fixed it with their latest firmware update (1.0.2).

[blueleaf]

im still havin a similar probelm in iTunes. I spent hours last night perfecting my iTunes and averything, but there are still 1 or 2 albums that just show up repeatadly, maybe 3 or 4 times, even though all of the settings are exactly the same...

[iPr0n]

After a week of sorting and experimenting with my CDs, I have found that the Cover Flow is less flaky than I first thought. If used correctly it can naturally maintain two separate sorted lists. Here is the way it displays albums

(1) By artist and grouped under that by album name. Ensure that the Compilation flag is OFF - even for multi-CD boxed sets or "best of" type releases... I have never in my life touched that option but I have discovered it to be arbitrarily set to "ON" by iTunes importing. It guesses wrong.

I also place the 2-digit year at the front of the title so that albums are shown in the chronological order...
Bowie, David
69 Space Oddity
71 Hunky Dory
72 The Man Who Sold The World

What happens for the year 2000 and beyond? I have found that 4-digit year will work correctly. Strange. My guess is that internally the iPod sorts by entire number and not by digits as letters.

2002 Heathen (2 CDs)

... is correctly ordered after the other albums.

Remember, even for multi-CD boxed sets, the Compilation flag is OFF. But in iTunes make sure Disc Number 1 of 2 and 2 of 2 are correctly filled in.


(2) By Album title if the Compilation flag is ON. The Artist field is displayed beneath the title... for example
Enter the Dragon (1973)
Lalo Schifrin


I use this mode to place soundtrack CDs and compilation CDs at the end of the Cover Flow list.
Soundtrack Album names are the name of the movie and year of release, as in "Sound of Music (1965)" That's just my convention.

To further separate compilation albums I add "0" to the Album titles ... so that "0 Miramar Collection 1 '94" comes after the last soundtrack CD - "Zed and Two Noughts (1985)"

A setback to compilation albums is that the Artist shown will be picked from the first song in that album. As opposed to "various" or blank... it had to pick something.

[analogika]

None of that is in any way necessary, nor does it solve the problems we are seeing.

Albums will be sorted chronologically if the "year" tag is filled in properly and you repeatedly click on the "album" column header until it shows "album by year".


The problem I'm seeing is a single album, say by CéU, completely correctly tagged (about a dozen times), no compilation tag set in any of the songs, no multiple versions of ID3 tags, album artist identical on all tracks, artist identical on all tracks, in fact ALL info (except track title) identical on all tracks, and STILL it shows up as four separate covers directly after each other in CoverFlow.