Organizing albums with the same title in iTunes?

I've been in the process of re-ripping and re-uploading my music collection into iTunes and I've run into a bit of a problem. I was trying to load up the first four Peter Gabriel albums (they're all named Peter Gabriel) and iTunes recognizes them all as the same album and clumps it together as one, even if the years are different. I ran into this problem first with an older version of iTunes as well, but I differentiated each album with a space following the album title and iTunes recognized it as separate albums that way. But now, I guess with the new version, it doesn't do that.

So I was wondering if there was a way to get iTunes to recognize them as separate albums that I don't know about? Too bad the space thing I did doesn't work anymore. I know I could rename them (1, 2, 3, 4) but that takes the fun out of having the first four Peter Gabriel albums all with the same name!

 

I believe you will have to differentiate the album title in some way whether 1, 2, etc or or possibly appending the year released. Or you might use the Album Artist field to show Peter Gabriel 1, Peter Gabriel 2 and I believe that field can be hidden and some views but might then separate those albums.

 

Didn't work unfortunately. Yeah, I don't think there's a way.

 

Might it make a difference if you tagged each LP with a different genre?
Or alternately you could label them Disc 1 of 4... 2 of 4.... etc. They'd be lumped in but at least would play in order.

 

You could use some kind of accent mark or foreign character so the name still looks like Peter Gabriel but iTunes will see them differently

 

I figured it out.

I decided to tag the albums in XLD. This allowed me to put spaces next to the albums to separate them and iTunes recognized it. However, I ran into another problem: for some reason, both albums were showing the year 1978 on my iPod, while they are 1977 and 1978 respectively and shown on iTunes. I was trying to figure out why this was the case and there was still a tagging issue. I fiddled around with the tags and with three spaces following the title of the first album, the year was shown as 1977 again. The second album kept at 1978. Very strange, but at least everything is in working order and titled appropriately!

 

I was wondering if you could use the sort as field, name them 1,2,3,4 in that field but leave the album names the same. I can' think of anything I have were I would want to mess with it to verify this or see how it sorts, but it was just a thought; I also have not clue how that would works on an iPod.

 

There is a sort feature on a separate tab that is behind the scenes and that is where you should be putting 1, 2, etc.

But for PG you really ought to use Car, Scratch, Melt, etc.

 

I use the sort album name field to do this by inserting the date of release in YYYYMMDD format.

You can also use the sort artist field so that it orders artist name by last name, first name (if you want to) while still displaying first name, last name in the browse window.

 

What options do I have for how it sorts on the iphone ios7? Just by date right? Did ios8 change anything? I end up using search before scrolling for those artists with tons of albums, then when you scroll you avoid the song listings.

 

Most of the time, I look for music based on the album name, so I need a little help with same titled albums.
In my collection, I tagged the PG albums as "Peter Gabriel (I)" "Peter Gabriel (II)", and so on.
Since there are so many albums titled "Greatest Hits", I always add the artist in parenthesis.

 

This is what appeals to me the most. Weezer has the same issues I believe.

 

I use square brackets to embed extra metadata. For example [2014 Pono 24/192].

You could add the year as a differentiator in square brackets. I did that with two albums titled "Weather Report." It ain't a perfect solution but it does work.

 

I just put the year in brackets:
Cheap Trick [1977]
Cheap Trick [1997]

 

I had to do that with The Mavericks, as they have a 1991 and a 2003 album, both named The Mavericks.