My wife and I have a large amount of music, mostly imported CD's in iTunes. A significant number of them are either 'various artists' or 'compilations', which iTunes imports into different albums or groups.
Is it just me, or is that kinda 'stupid' in this day of electronic music databases? Shouldn't iTunes be able to figure out that it is the same record?
Anyway, not to complain too much about the 'free' iTunes (you get what you pay for). Basic question is, is there a tool that will automate the kind of 'cleanup' of our iTunes library to reassemble the albums correctly without us having to edit each one? I know there are artwork and duplicate tools, and ones that 'fix' the ID3 information, but don't see any that fix the 'various artists' or 'compilation' annoyance.
iTunes is still buggy. I have ran into several issues similar to yours, I don't have a fix for all of them. Here are the ones i have fixed
Keep in mind that iTunes organizes music like this
artist/album/track - for single artist albums , that includes album artist
compilations/album/track - for compilations
Issue: single album shows as multiple albums
Fixes:
1. If it's a Compilation CD, make sure that the album info has "compilation" checked
2. if it's a remix album, where one artist remixes songs from other artists, make the remixer artist the album artist. That will group the songs into a single album as "album artist" supercedes "artist".
3. if that doesn't work,
select all of the songs and add the letter "x" to the end of each field that is the same for every song.
Hit ok to apply changes
The albums should now be joined.
Click on "album info" and rename the album to the correct name.
For example, a compilation named "Hits of the 70s" . Rename it to ""Hits of the 70sx". Save. Name it back to previous name. Save.
#3 is an old fix for an old bug in iTunes. I don't know if they'll ever fix it.
if it's a multiple CD album set the CD " x of y" for all the tracks before you fix the album name. It's difficult to fix after you join them because you'll have 3 song 1's, 3 song 2's, etc . iTunes will show which songs belong to which CD. It's pretty nifty.
On the subject of automation, go do a site like Discogs or
https://musicbrainz.org/ and look up an album . Some albums have as many as 14 releases that may different in organization , song content, and the inclusion of extra "bonus" songs. Sometimes iTunes can figure out which release you have, but not often in my experience.
There are apps like Headphones and Lidarr that can import your library and try to figure out album names and even rename music files and folders. However, they aren't good at compilation albums.
Trust me , I feel your pain as I've been fixing my iTunes library for the last 3 weeks trying to get it organized correctly after not caring for a few decades. It's a lot of work. Often it's easier to delete the albums and re-import them than to try and fix the mess that is in iTunes.