iPod Boring old album sorting help

What do you have in the Album Artist field? iTunes uses Album and Album Artist to determine albums.

Holymanm said:

I'm trying to upload a few soundtracks for a TV show, and have them all show up under the same artist, then seperate albums (just the name of the TV show, preferably) in music > artists on my ipod classic. There are about 9 artists involved total. When I make them all have the same album artist, the formatting works perfectly in itunes... but when I look at it on my ipod, it's all back to chaos again. What oh what to do?

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Here's what you do:

First, make a Playlist of your soundtrack. Then, when you've got all the songs in the sequence you want, you'll have to change all the track tags so that iTunes recognizes that Playlist as a single album. For instance:

PLAYLIST (with original ID tag info)
Song A by Artist A, Album Artist A, from Album A, Track 1 of 10
Song B by Artist B, Album Artist B, from Album B, Track 3 of 12
Song C by Artist C, Album Artist C, from Album C, Track 2 of 10

Then you change them to read:

ALBUM (with revised ID tag info)
Song A by Artist A, Album Artist, from Soundtrack Title, Track 1 of 3
Song B by Artist B, Album Artist, from Soundtrack Title, Track 2 of 3
Song C by Artist C, Album Artist, from Soundtrack Title, Track 3 of 3


Don't forget to make sure the final "album" is Disc 1 of 1, and that the Album and Sort Album names are uniform. If the Sort Album field isn't uniform, it won't keep things together. If, for instance, Album A is actually titled "The Album A," then iTunes automatically made its Sort Album ID read "Album A." If you don't change that Sort Album ID to "Soundtrack Title," then the song(s) from "The Album A" will continue to be sorted as being from that album, and not your Soundtrack Title album.

I would also suggest you make the Album Artist read, "Various Artists" with a Sort Album Artist tag of "ZZ Various Artists." I like this, because it keeps compilations alphabetized at the end of my library, instead of having Various Artist inserted between the U's and W's.