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

Hate iTunes ? Use sharepod

I am a first time user of the 'i' family {ipod, iphone, itunes}. I own an iphone. Before iphone, I used other phones like Sony Erricson W800 and Nokia N80. One of the most common requirement is to store music on the phone. In those phones, it used to be straight forward. You just create folders/sub-folders and dump the music files there. The phone also carries the same concept of folder that we have on the PC. Once I add music to phone I can delete from my PC. I can delete music from my mobile whenever I wanted to do it.

When I came to iphone+itunes, its a new world for me. First of all there is no concept of folder in iphone and for that matter an ipod also. Apple might have thought that all its users are dumb asses who do not understand the concept of a folder. Next thing is the synching part. First you have to add it into itunes, organize in it and then sync it to the iphone/ipod. If there are music files in iphone and they are not present in itunes list, they will get deleted from iphone on sync. All the music files should have proper ID3 tags to be arranged according to albums. I can keep talking about many such nuances. In short, I hate itunes.

While I was looking for alternatives, I came across Sharepod. It is an alternative to the iTunes to load music files into iphone/ipod. Yes, you can put music into iphone also. Though it does not solve all the problems that I was talking about, it alleviates some of the problems. It has some nice features like dragging files from explorer and put in iphone, add and remove music from iphone etc.

But do not jump out of your chair yet. It has some problems too. First of all it does not have all the functionality of itunes. Say for e.g. podcast synching. So, if you are the type of person who want both music and podcasts, I guess sharepod is not for you. The problem is that if you add music with sharepod and try to synch podcasts with itunes, itunes will delete the files added from sharepod because the music is not in itunes list. I am a victim to this problem myself. I do not know a solution to this. Any help is appreciated.