I don't know iPods specifically, but here's what it sounds like: Your pirated (arr, matey) music doesn't have consistent tags. "Rage Against The Machine" may be different from "Rage Against the Machine", and is definitely different from "Rage Against The Machine", "Rage Agianst The Machine", "Rage Against Teh Machine", "Rage Against The Machine.", and "Rage Against The Machine".
Before loading them into your iPod, and probably before loading them into iTunes, use a mass tag editor to write artist (and maybe album) tags to all of them at once.
I recommend these two very efficient mass taggers:
Musicbrainz Picard -
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Picard_Tagger
- Picard has some great sorting and auto-tagging features. It can also automatically tag completely unidentified songs by comparing what they sound like against an online database of songs. The interface is not very intuitive, though.
mp3tag -
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
- Small, simple, fast, and inutitive, mp3tag takes the pain out of tagging your music collection manually. It supports mp3, wma, and probably a bunch of other formats. It is
great for manually retagging a bunch of files at once.
I'd recommend you start with mp3tag because it's smaller, quicker, and simpler, just to get your current job done...then try Picard to fix up and organize your whole collection automatically.
---------- Post added at 08:16 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:16 AM ----------
Oh, and music piracy is illegal in most countries.