Albums split up in "grid" view in iTunes 8

The new Album "grid" view in iTunes is welcomed by many users, but several are having problems with the same album showing multiple times in this view.

User choix de guerre writes:

"When browsing my albums in the new grid tab of itunes, some of my albums are split up into their own separate album. for example the 'august rush' album i purchased from itunes is split into twelve different albums."

In addition to songs not displaying as the same album, the songs may not play in the proper order or otherwise behave as part of the same album. This problem is not new to iTunes 8, and is most likely from inconsistencies in the album metadata that iTunes uses to group songs together. In previous versions of iTunes, these inconsistencies might have been overlooked since users for the most part had only list views to see their songs, but with the new grid layout view, errors in this metadata become more apparent. While this problem is most likely to occur with user-imported songs, especially those from different sources, it is possible this could occur with songs purchased from the iTunes store if the metadata gets changed.

Fix: Ensure album metadata is uniform If any small differences exist in some of the metadata fields for individual songs in an album, iTunes may see them as belonging to different albums. To ensure uniformity, select all the songs in an album, and then get information (command-i) on them to edit the metadata tags. Check the boxes next to the "Album" and "Disc Number" fields, as well as the total number field under "Track Number", then enter the appropriate information for the album and press "OK". This should now have all the songs listed under the same album.

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