Guys, I have a problem with iTunes. What I want is really very simple, but for the life of me I cannot get it right.

Here's the story: I've bought one of those latest models iPod Nano's, you know the stamp format ones. This is my first experience with iTunes, other than making a backup from my iPad.

Now, I want to put Benny Benassi's Toolroom Knights mix album onto my Nano. This is a double CD and all the tracks are mixed. So it is important to play the tracks in the original order and not use shuffle. This also means that every track has got a different artist and title, yet the album name stays the same (duh!).

I've got all the MP3's. I've filled in the tags correctly. All tracks are numbered correctly and those from disc 1 got numbered #disc '1' in the tag (same for disc 2 tracks). (again: duh!)

Now, if I put those files in my library, iTunes does not respect the original order of the tracks. It insists on sorting them alphabetically on artist. I don't know why it's doing that!! Another strange thing: when the files are on the Nano, and I want to select the album through -> "album", ALL TRACKS are their own album (containing one track), even though the album is clearly the same all the time! When I right-click on a track and select "show files in windows explorer", I can see that iTunes has effectively made a separate sub-folder for every track. WTF?

I also tried uploading M83's 'Hurry up, we're dreaming', which is a normal album, meaning the tracks are not mixed. This works perfectly. The tracks don't get sorted in any way and remain in their order as stated in the #track number field. Of course, in this case, the artist is the same as well each time. But I cannot believe this could be the reason.

I'm completely stumped! What am I doing wrong? There is no shuffle mode or something enabled. I must say I'm starting to hate iTunes with a passion. This surely would NOT have been a problem with the Empeg!

Any suggestions? I'm completely lost...

Thanks!

In iTunes, go to View, and choose List. Then select all the songs that are part of the album, right click, pick "Get Info", go to the Options tab, and change Part of a compilation to yes.

What Tom's suggesting means your album will be a "various artists" compilation and should do the trick to keep everything together.

Another way, if you don't want "various artists" but you want it listed as a particular artist, is to set compilation = NO and to set "Album Artist" (this is the ID3 TPE2 tag, aka the "band" tag) for every track to be "Benni Benassi"

Then you will have the album sort under "Benni Benassi" even though individual songs may be from any number of different artists.

Don't hate iTunes for this simple issue. What you're describing here is basic tagging and the result should be the same regardless of whether you're using iTunes or iPod or something else. These settings are required to keep an album together if you have different artist names, otherwise there's no logical way for software to know that the different tracks actually belong to the same album, versus belonging to different albums with the same name.

The empeg didn't use tags to manage/organize/display your tracks, so it didn't matter what the tags were at all so long as you had the music organized properly in folders on your had drive. That's a very basic and inflexible way to deal with music. As far as handling music sorting and grouping, iTunes generally works very well (as of version 7). Newer versions have grown into bloated pigs with some poor UI choices, but that's not relevant here.

To be "complete" you should also set the iTunes tags for GAPLESS and DO NOT SHUFFLE for all the tracks. That should allow them to play without a gap and will prevent a shuffle mode from picking those tracks when played back in iTunes and iDevices.

Ok, it seems I owe iTunes an apology. Turns out the culprit was my tagger "Tag & Rename" which I've been using for years. The option "Auto copy Artist data into Album Artist tag field if it is clear" was checked. This is so by default it seems, but I didn't know that and this has never been a problem, up to know. Your comment above is what made me think. My usual taggers MP3 Tag Studio and Tag & Rename don't see this Album Artist field. Well, Tag & Rename does, but it doesn't show it where the other tag info is, but instead in a sub menu buried deep underneath. Since this "Album Artist" tag automatically got filled in with the "Artist" of each song (without me knowing), iTunes created a separate album for each track. A pain, but in hindsight, understandable and easily fixed.
It was your comment above Bruno which made me think, and I eventually checked the file info with WinAmp and there it was! Mp3Tag, yet another tagger DID work well in showing me the field and letting me change it in batch for the entire album to "Benny Benassi". This works great!

Only one downside: it seems iTunes doesn't take the pull the #disc field from the tag, so all the tracks (both from disc 1 and disc 2) are listed after one another on my iPod. That way it's difficult to immediately select the second disc to play, should I not know which track the disc starts with. In other words, is there a way to make iTunes/my Nano make a division between both discs? When selecting the album to be played, something like: album -> disc 2 -> track#1 of disc 2 (well, the name of that track of course)

I suppose I could change the name of the album to "Toolroom Knights CD1" and "Toolroom Knights CD2" which would solve this problem, but that would mean there would be TWO "Toolroom Knights" albums getting shown in the albums list again, which I would like to avoid if possible...

Another question: on my Nano, while playing, the artist name and track name scroll if they are too long to fit the screen. The album name however, does not. Can I change this somewhere in the settings?



I'm indeed not using the "part of a compilation" flag because the "Album Artist" flag works better for my needs now that I know it's there and how to use it.

Thanks guys!

MP3Tag is by far the best tagger I've used for for any platform. I also have licenses for Tag&Rename and a few others that I don't use at all anymore. It's the most complete and can easily find problem tags. I make sure to always delete ALL tag data except ID3v2.3 and I also use its "Extended Tags" to make sure nothing unexpected is set by accident.

I use it in combination with iTunes for all my tagging. First iTunes and then MP3Tag.

In iTunes, since I'm on a Mac, I use a ton of AppleScripts to do things that you can't do natively in iTunes UI for tag manipulation - some of these things you can do in MP3Tag as well.

iTunes will deal with multiple discs as part of a single release properly as long as the correct fields are filled in. Make sure both the disc number and "of disc" fields are populated. Example in the Get Info window: 1 of 2

When you list the collection in iTunes and sort using "ALBUM by ARTIST -> YEAR," it will display the album with disc 1 first and then disc 2 following it. Example screenshot below.

I don't know how this appears on the new Nano. Older iPods in the classic line had terrible software and it didn't even use the Album Artist tag, even though all that was long ago supported in iTunes. I would think the Nano would deal with everything iTunes can do, but it may not.

Aha! Very informative, thanks again Bruno!