iTunes Various Artists Issue

I have an album of various artists that I have marked as a compilation in iTunes:



When syncing with my iPhone's Music app, everything comes over exactly like this, except the album artist on the phone displays as Christopher Lennertz, one of the individually credited artists from the 6 referred to in the above screen.


My question is - why? I have other albums checked as compilations, and no such hiccup occurs when syncing them to the phone, the compilation albums just show as not having an album artist. Admittedly this a not a huge issue, I'd just like to get at the root cause.


All files are .m4a, which I noticed have fewer tagging issues in iTunes compared to .mp3.


Any ideas?

Posted on Feb 5, 2025 11:10 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 5, 2025 11:38 AM

For best results with compilations you should also fill in the album artist as Various Artists, or whatever other single value might be appropriate, like Original London Cast for a musical.


Quite why this one is showing a specific artist when other compilations don't is one of those quirks of the Apple ecosystem that are hard to pin down. It may because multiple tracks are credited to that artist, even though there are more to another, and his isn't track 1, it might be that it was one of the first tracks transferred (because syncing isn't necessarily done in order).


tt2

Similar questions

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 5, 2025 11:38 AM in response to Naferr

For best results with compilations you should also fill in the album artist as Various Artists, or whatever other single value might be appropriate, like Original London Cast for a musical.


Quite why this one is showing a specific artist when other compilations don't is one of those quirks of the Apple ecosystem that are hard to pin down. It may because multiple tracks are credited to that artist, even though there are more to another, and his isn't track 1, it might be that it was one of the first tracks transferred (because syncing isn't necessarily done in order).


tt2

Feb 8, 2025 07:16 AM in response to Naferr

Pretty sure the smaller one is reporting the size in Gibibytes (2^30) while the larger one showing the same size but in Gigabytes (10^9). 2^10 is 1024 vs. 10^3 which is 1000. For 1K the difference isn't much, but it gets more serious as you move up orders of magnitude. It explains why the old 160Gb iPod classic only had around 149Gib of storage. Which measure of a Gb is used varies by operating system and application.


tt2

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

iTunes Various Artists Issue

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.