The iPhone music app and iTunes require Album Artist tag to match the Artist tag when importing songs in order for those songs to be grouped in the same album and same artist. If Album artist does not match, then they split them into separate albums. When I edit a song with Audacity and export it, it clears Album Artist and so I must then edit its tags separately to add Album Artist so the songs will be grouped together correctly.
When I was digitzing my vinyl for iTunes I always managed the metadata in iTunes rather than Audacity. Audacity’s handling of metadata is, shall we say, not one of its strongpoints
- record album
- place labels at start of each song - 01 , 02 , 03 , etc
- Export Multiple as default 16-bit WAVS
- Import WAVs into iTunes
- use iTunes to convert the WAVs to AAC or MP3
- now work on the metadata in iTunes (including album art)
As part of the metadata management I stripped of the 01,02,03 etc and used those as the Track Number - they were just there temporarily to retain track numbering.
Muse, who now own Audacity, are well aware of metadata issues in Audacity - there is a “super-bug” (collection of issues) logged on their GitHub issue tracker:
Improved metadata handling in Audacity #1464
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1464
Peter