Today, I was playing tunes in shuffle on my computer while reading. I needed to make a town run (another story) and was enjoying a Righteous Bros tune and decided to continue listening to them on my iPod. I could not find them under artists, but they were under album. However, the album view held a whole bunch of different artists.

I did some research and found out that everything that was a Greatest Hits album was scrambled up. I wound up spending half the afternoon on redoing my iPod. All of my albums now have a unique album name. Instead of Greatest Hits, it is [artist] Greatest Hits. While I was at it, I found that every one of them had a album cover from some group I have never heard of. I had to remove every single one of those album pictures by hand. Couldn't find any way to bulk remove them. I did a little checking and was able to download album covers with little fuss from Amazon. Some albums did not have images, but the artists had similar albums that were close enough. I now have 1500 songs downloaded onto my iPod and every one of them is in proper place and with an album cover. I am so pleased with myself, like only an old fart could be. My wife thinks that I have managed to find a way to blow off yard work again. (Why does she think I am so pleased with myself?)

Funny, I found your post while in the middle of doing exactly the same thing.

Did you use one of BABC sponsors? Like FixTunes.com?

Did you check your IPOD settings first for show "artists" and "compliations"?

+1
i have been working on my first iPod/iTunes the past coupld days

i have a large collection of Grateful Dead, a lifetime of collecting albeit interrupted by a theft of some of them, so i am capturing all Dead to iPod

i am learning on the fly, ( i even PM'd D-Rod for help a couple days ago but his message box was full and not receiving so i've learned on my own )

i bought a Classic iPod which has both the Best and Worst feature of the ipod family:
the Best: it hold 160Gb. of data (!) compared to the newer iPod Touch which holds about 1/10 of that,
the Worst: the Classic uses a (spinning) harddrive storage while the newer Touch uses Flash storage,
but the storage capabilities of the Classic, and the robustness of its drive, made it the choice i needed

i am using the 'AICC' encoder to input my files as versus the 'AAC'
songs which might have otherwise been about 4mg on my iPod are now 50mg, with some songs exceeding 200mg !!

i am archiving the Dead by album and creating playlists by year and bandmember,
i won't archive any 'best-of' albums since i will already have those songs on 'Live' albums, so i am having great luck with iTunes downloading appropriate artwork

its taken a couple days of messing around but i so far have about 40Gb of songs and have yet to get to my later years of the Dead and haven't gotten to my videos of them

because i am capturing all my songs with AICC, i bought better earphones then came with the iPod, i bought the Shure 530 which although they cost more then the iPod itself provide some great sound

i am enjoying the process, and enjoying the ability to walk my dogs while listening

Well... I hope you have better luck with that hard drive than I and a lot of other people did. I don't think we got a year out of it. They wouldn't be particularly hard to replace, except that Apple (as usual) has got the supply of them sealed up like a drum.

My family got me an 8GB 3rd-gen Nano for Father's Day - my first mp3 player that's actually mine. I have to say, as a former ipod and itunes basher (thanks largely to the experience I just described), I've liked it a LOT. Itunes seems to be quite a bit more stable than it was a couple of years ago, and no moving parts in the player is a good thing. Con: battery life, IMO, should be quite a bit longer.

thanks for reopening that nagging worry i had almost got rid of

i believe that i read somewhere that Apple is phasing them out,

a 2 year warranty but unfortunately that pretty much mandates that i also keep that 60Gb of data on my computer's harddrive so in case of iPod catostrophic breakdown i don't have to go thru that CD download process again

Sorry! Keep the faith, they didn't all fail. You could certainly have one that holds up a good long time. Just pretend I didn't say anything .