In the Music app on macOS, why won't albums with guest artists show up as an album??

[reubs]

I'm in the process of ripping CDs to Music, and some of my albums I just can't get them to show up as an album. For example, if the artist is "Artist" and there are 12 tracks, but there is "artist plus guest", they get a separate listing in the library. It drives me nuts, and it makes it so that I can't easily play an album all the way through because one entry has 12 track and the other has one. They are not marked as a compilation, but in search they show up as two separate entries. I think this has been a problem with iTunes and now Music for a while, but I can't find a work around, other than deleting the "and guest," and this is especially difficult because the Finder library is just as cluttered and it's a real mess with hip-hop albums.

Any help or insight?

 

[Brian33]

I think you can fix this by editing the "info" for the tracks. You want all of the tracks to have the same value for "Album" and also for "Album Artist" (which can be different from the track's "Artist" field).

 

[Brian33]

Another thing to try: after importing the tracks, use the Songs view and sort by Date Added. Select ALL of the tracks for that album, and hit Command-I. Then put the desired values in Album Artist. That makes it pretty quick to do.

(Note: my experience is with iTunes, but I think you can still do it that way in Music.)

 

[reubs]

So here's an example. I think everything is the same with these, but there's no reason imaginable why iTunes/Music shouldn't show these two as a single album. I could go in and update the metadata individually, but then, that opens me up to the possibility/probability of mucking it up even more.