Help with album grouping with more than one artist

[mstrze]

I've noticed that several CDs I have loaded show up as multiple individual albums which makes playing said album all the way thorugh impossible on my ATV (and iPhone as well). This is in the case when another singer may have contributed to a track...EX: Billy Joel's 1986 album "The Bridge" shows up as three separate albums, one from Billy Joel, one from Billy Joel and Ray Charles and one from Billy Joel and Cyndi Lauper.

I have searched here and read about clicking on all tracks and then clicking "Part of a Compilation" on the Get Info page, or renaming the artist for all of them, in this case use just Billy Joel, but that removes the ability for me to be able to search for all songs with Ray Charles in my collection, let's say.

Is there an easier sorting option in iTunes to keep all songs of the same album, within the same album container? Or is the 'compilation' option the best?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[MacDane]

There's an "Album Artist" field in Info. Use that to write the primary album artist ("Billy Joel" if it's an "Billy Joel with friends"-type album) or use something like "Various" if it's a compilation album (like "VH1 Hits" or something).

I'm not sure, but I think that the "Part of a compilation" should only be used with "real" compilations that span multiple discs. Otherwise they will turn up as "Compilations" on your ATV, which can make them a royal pain to find