Compilations Pestilence in iTunes

For most of us how our music files are organised is of little interest, iTunes takes care of it. We just see the collated view of our music library. But for some users iTunes causes problems. First, iTunes creates an awful lot of folders; second, you get one massive folder called 'Compilations'.

Compilations will contain a large number of albums lobbed there without any rhyme or reason by the random hand of fate that is the CDDB database. Also, you'll get a main folder per artist, within which you'll find all the tracks attributed to that person. This can be complex when you have a large number of artists with just one track. If, for example, the main artist is a rap star the chances are the rest of the tracks on the album will co-credit another artist using the term 'featuring' or 'feat.' or even 'ft'. Everytime two names are joined together you get yet another artist folder.

How can you overcome this?

First the curse of featuring. No quick way round this but you just have to edit out everything that appears after the main artists name. If you've ticked the box 'Keep iTunes library organized' in Advanced / Preferences then those stray tracks will be moved back to where they belong - in the main artist's folder.

Second let's tackle compilations. You need to isolate everything in the compilations folder. This is how you do it - go to Prefernces / General and tick the box 'Group compilations when browsing'. Then when you look at your library, in the Artist column, you'll see an entry for Compilations. Click on this and you'll see all the tracks which have been marked as part of a compilation.

Select all these tracks by highlighting one of them then hitting Control + A. Right click, and Get info. The box that pops up has a box in the bottom left corner marked Compilation. Just switch the setting from Yes to No, and as if by magic iTunes will slot all thos tracks out of the amorphous Compialtions folder into the artist folder.