Fix for itunes not grouping the same albums together

Sometimes it happens that even though a set of files has the same album name, they are not grouped together. This becomes a bigger problem when they are transferred into the iphone/ipod. In the iphone, they will be presented under different albums and hence with different covers. So, the nice cover flow feature of the iphone becomes ugly. Stupidly, even though the same album is shown with different covers, the list of songs under each cover will be the same. For me, this is an irritating problem.

After some googling, I found that itunes does not use just the album name to group the songs. It uses other fields like artist name, album art etc to group it. So, the fix is to have the same artist name, album artist name for the entire album. Even the album art does matter. If you want to be religious about the artist name do not want to change it, you still have a way. You can group them under a single compilation. See the discussions here, here, and here to get more details about the fix.

You can use itunes to change the properties of the music files. But, if you manage your own mp3 without itunes, it may be a good idea to use a tool to do batch edit of ID3 tag names. I use a software named "Media Monkey" to do this. Its a nice and feature rich tool. You can apply tags to set of files at the same time. Previously I used to use "ID3 TagIT". When you use a different tool other than itunes, you should remember that you should delete the files from itunes and reload them. Removing form the playlist is not enough, it should be removed from the music library also. Or else, if you place the files in the playlist, it will still retain the old tags. (I faced this problem first hand ;) )

Fix (Summary):
- Make sure that the artist name is the same
- Make sure that the album artist name is the same
- Make sure that the album art is the same
- Optionally, Try to group them as single compilation
- If you are not using itunes to change tags, remember to remove songs from itunes library (not playlist) and reload