The reason you are seeing multiples of album covers in iTunes is the result of errors in your ID3 tags for songs. If the Artist and Album fields for the tracks in an album do not match exactly, iTunes will (rightfully) see the tracks as belonging to different albums given that two different artists may have similarly named albums and, if the album name is not the same, obviously the album is different.

You must make sure that for any given album the Artist and Album fields have the exact same content. The best way to do this is to select all of the tracks in an album and open the Info dialog (command-I or File > Get Info). If either the Artist of Album field is empty in the Info dialog after having selected multiple tracks, that is a clear indicator that the field is inconsistent across the selected tracks. Editing the tracks simultaneously guarantees that the fields you edit are consistent across the selected tracks.

Under no circumstances can you force iTunes to properly recognize an album if any of the tracks have a different album name. On the other hand, you may have various artists on a single album, but to have iTunes properly recognize such an album, you must indicate that the tracks in that album are part of a compilation.

In essence, iTunes canot work properly if the user does not put effort into making sure that the information in iTunes is consistent and correct.

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“Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.” 2.3GHz Power Mac G5/4GB/500GB HDD/OS X 10.4.11/30-inch ACD, 60GB iPod (Color)

It's a convention used to store data in an MP3 file - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25293

The Album Artist field is used for album grouping; I completely forgot to mention that field, which is ironic as I use it. The idea is that on any given album each track may have varied artist information without having to designate albums that are not compilations as such. For instance, on Queen’s Hot Space, the Artist field would contain ‘Queen’ except for the song “Under Pressure” that would (properly) be ‘Queen featuring David Bowie’. On producer-driven albums such as Quincy Jones’ Dude and Back On The Block, nearly every track is a different set of artists, but it is still a Quincy Jones album.

The Album column in iTunes can be changed by clicking the header that cycles through “Album”, “Album by Artist” and “Album by Year”. If Album by Artist is chosen, and the Album Artist field is consistently utilized throughout your music library, your music will be sorted properly with albums grouped by the album artist even if the individual tracks on the album have different artist fields.

The only downside is that the application of the Album Artist field does not affect folder naming for an organized iTunes folder. That is, if the tracks in an album have varied artists, there will be different folders in the iTunes folder for different artists, thus splitting the contents of an album over several folders. If album artists are employed within the iTunes library, they should also be employed in folder management on the hard drive. I have twice written comments to Apple about this oversight since the Album Artist field was introduced in iTunes 7.

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“Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.” 2.3GHz Power Mac G5/4GB/500GB HDD/OS X 10.4.11/30-inch ACD, 60GB iPod (Color)