Songs of the same album art not grouped together : Duet

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This is a follow up to one of my previous post on the possible reasons for the songs of the same album art not grouped together in Cover Flow.
Another possible reason is the existence of a duet in the album. A duet is a song that is sang by two person. So in an album, the main artist might have 9 songs he sang on his own while 1 song he joined with another person (usually an opposite sex and usually a love song…)
For example, in this cover flow view:
Same Album Guest Singer
You can see that the album art has a duplicate in the cover flow and the second album art appearing is between Jay Chou (周杰伦) and Lara in his album, November’s Chopin (十一月的蕭邦). That is confirmed in the listing:
Listing for Jay Chou Album with Lara
To solve this, you do a right click on the album tracks from the same album (all of them) and choose GET INFO. You can see a field called ALBUM ARTIST
Album Artist field in iTunes
Fill it up with the main singer of the album (i.e. the person who is the actual artist for this album).
Adding singer to album artist field in iTunes
And pesto, the issue is solved and you can see one single album art for that album and the main artist name is at the bottom of the album art:
Album Art issue resolved with album artist field
This field, Album Artist, is specifically used by iTunes for this purpose. In the MP3 ID tag, most software used the field BAND to map to the Album Artist.
A comment I read in hydrogenaudio web site:

Like or not, the ID3v2 “TPE2” tag (what some tag applications call “BAND”) is the equivalent of Album Artist simply by pop usage (iTunes, all Microsoft products, etc.) It’s so common, that Mp3Tag even maps the UI “BAND” to the native Album Artist tag in both M4A/AAC (aART) and WMA (WM/AlbumArtist).

I used the BAND MP3 ID tag a lot in my favourite MP3tag software. Will talk more about it next time !

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4 thoughts on “Songs of the same album art not grouped together : Duet

  1. Anonymous

    I’ve tried grouping the songs by Album Artist but the duet songs are still shown as different artists when viewing from my iPod. Is there any way too fix this?

  2. Anonymous

    Yes, I checked the songs and they are from the same Album. The problem isn’t with iTunes though, because when I add the Album Artist field, iTunes shows it as one album. However, it is my iPod nano which isn’t grouping the duet songs.

  3. Anonymous

    I have ripped a multi CD into different folders (same album). When I add files from each folder separately, I noticed that the album art does not group together. Tried the advise above but to no avail. Then I realise when I selected all the files and looked into the info, realise that there wasnt any info for "Album". I confirmed that the Album info was made available when I perform the tagging. Thereafter, I filled up the "Album" and the album art is grouped.

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