ipod - Lost Albums?

I don't think this is an iTunes glitch because Apple doesn't make mistakes right? But if anyone else has had this problem it would be worth reading this to fix it.

There have been a few albums that I have in iTunes that are often quite difficult to find when looking on my ipod. For instance, an album I have by Oscar Peterson called Oscar Peterson Trio + 1 Clark Terry. (Great album by the way!) I would search under Oscar Peterson on my ipod and never find it yet I knew the album was there because a search in itunes would find it. If I searched by album I would find it by the album title but it wouldn't show up under Artist! The same thing happened for The Wallflowers. I have two of their albums and I couldn't find either one when I searched for The Wallflowers. The Wallflowers would never show up under artists. I can never remember the album names so I would never be able to find them.

Today I discovered the problem. I think it has to do with when I am importing the CD. The CDDB database that iTunes gets all the track names from brings in other information too. The key piece of information here is that sometimes it considers an album to be a compilation. When that option is checked, it doesn't list the artist under artist on the ipod. Or at least that's what seems to happen. After I changed it, everything worked like a charm so here's what you do.

Go into your home directory and find your iTunes folder. Under "C" find compilations. Go through that folder and look for albums that you know are not actually compilations. When you find one (like I did with Oscar Peterson) then go into iTunes and find that same album. Select it so that that album shows up in the bottom window. Highlight the entire album, right click or apple-i to 'get info' and you'll get a window like this.


In the bottom left corner you'll see an option that says "Compilation". That will say "Yes" as mine does in the image above. Change that to "No", click OK and that will fix it all up. Now your albums will be where you expect to find them.

Now I have a bunch of "new" albums to listen to.