I have a number of albums that are compilations with a variety of artists but which lend themselves to having a single Album Artist for the purposes of identifying them. Two examples are Queen's Greatest Hits which has some tracks with Queen and various guest artists, and the Chieftain's Long Black Veil which has guest artists on most tracks. With the latter album I can specify 'Chieftains' as the Album Artist and it shows up in both iTunes and on my iPod (in both Cover Flow and Albums) as a single album by 'Chieftains' but with individual track artists visible in both iTunes and on the iPod. But this doesn't happen with the Queen album where those tracks with an additional artist show up as a different album in Cover Flow (but not in Albums), despite having defined the Album Artist in all three albums as 'Queen'.

Is there any obvious reason why there is this seemingly different behaviour for identical approaches to naming albums? And of course if I identify these albums as compilations they get given Various Artists as the Album Artist, no matter what I have actually put.

Is it possible to correct this? I want to be able to have my albums in Cover Flow on my iPod appear only by Album Artist and not by track artist.
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Thats how I tag mine - I only use compilations if there is no "main" artist associated with the album.

If you've turned OFF compilations & filled in Album Artist, then it should show as one album in coverflow - just like The Chieftain's Long Black Veil (good album, BTW). Are there any other of the album-wide tags that are different on the Queen albums (Disc A of B, Total # Tracks)?
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I've checked though both albums (and other similar ones such as Grease!) and they all seem to be tagged in the same way. And they are all rips from CDs rather than being a mix of rips and downloads and there is no obvious reason why one album shows up the way I want it to but the others don't! But interestingly when I search for these albums in the Album menu on the iPod if I mark them as Compilations they all appear with Various Artists as the album artist; but if I leave the Compilation box unchecked, then the album artist is in fact the track artist of the first track on the Album. In Cover Flow, however, they appear under Various Artists when marked as compilations, but when not marked as Compilations the Chieftains Album Long Black Veil appears alongside the other two Chieftain albums but Grease appears in numerous places attributed to different track artists but in each case apparently the whole album would be played if selected; and the Queen Album likewise. Weird!

It should be simple - select not a compilation, name the album artist, and expect to see the album grouped with others by that artist. Just the way you'd store the CDs on your shelf. But it won't work that way apparently unless I'm doing something wrong that I haven't realised! And yet Cover Flow is so nearly perfect, if it wasn't for this.
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