My biggest complaint with iTunes was always it’s mediocre metadata support when compared to Windows Media Player. However, sometime in the past year Apple quietly updated iTunes to support the last remaining critical meta data field, Album Artist.

Why do I care about Album Artist? Well lets take a look at the latest George Michael Twenty Five CD (yes, I do in fact like George Michael, it reminds me of being a child of the 80s).

Anyway, take a look at the normal “Artist” Field”.

The problem with this is now when I look at my music in Cover Flow modeI see separate entries for:

• George Michael
• Wham!
• George Michael & Paul McCartney
• George Michael & Elton John

However, this is not what I want. I purchased a CD, and I want to lookup and browse using the Album Artist: George Michael.

Well in prior versions of iTunes you were stuck with this lame behavior. However, in Windows Media Player, it does the right thing(tm).

Well the latest iTunes has an Album Artist field. Just go to View -> View Options and select Album Artist.

When you do that you can get this:

Now Cover Flow will work as expected and you won’t see more entries than the number of CDs.

Unfortunately, the iPod does not support Album Artist yet, and as such iPod Cover Flow is broken in this respect. To bad. I hope that gets fixed.