Why Do I See Multiple Albums in My Music Player?

Submitted by on Wed, 06/08/2011 - 00:00
Why do I see multiple albums in my music player? This question comes up from time to time and we answer it. Sometimes people just leave a bad review (I'm not sure if those people will read the website), however, this problem is certainly fixable. Let's take a look at some steps that should clear this up.



Cause #1 - The songs are not listed to have the same album artist or are not listed as a compilation in iTunes.

Should your music player just put all songs with the same album name together? Probably not. Do you own a greatest hits album? What if you own "Greatest Hits" by Michael Jackson and "Greatest Hits" by Pink Floyd? Would you be happy if they were combined together in your music player? Maybe! But, maybe not. The point here is that having the same album name is not always enough information to clump the two albums together. Enter "Album Artist" and "Compilation" in iTunes.

Let's take a look at the album "I Love The 70's" in iTunes



As we can see, the artist is not the same for every song. But it is the same album. Unfortunately, your music player may not see it this way...
The good news is that we can fix this up in a few simple steps....
First, select all of the songs in the album.  (Tip: Select the top one, then hold down shift and select the bottom one)
 
Now right-click and select "Get Info"

 
You'll need to confirm that you realize that these changes will affect all of the files selected.

 
Now we can do one of two things.  You can set the "Album Artist" or...

 
You can set that these songs are part of a compilation.  Now let's re-run iSyncr and see what we get.
Wait!  It still looks bad!  What happened!!  Well, iSyncr doesn't remove songs unless you ask it to.  In this case, I forgot to check "Remove Music Not In These Playlists" in the USB app, or select "Remove Abandoned" in the WiFi app.  So we are looking at the old songs and the new songs.
After telling iSyncr to remove the old versions of the songs, I now have what I expected all along.  One album.  Woot!

Cause #2

If you tried the steps above and you still see two copies of an album, perhaps there are two copies on the device?  For this cause, we've got a whole other blog entry.