Section 67. About Organizing Your Music


67. About Organizing Your Music

Before You Begin

See Also

Import a Music CD into iTunes

Examine and Modify Song Information Tags

Add a Music or Video File to Your iTunes Library

 


iTunes works just fine if you never touch any of the info tags yourself. You can import CDs while trusting to the information provided by the Gracenote CDDB query (as described in Import a Music CD into iTunes). You can purchase music from the iTunes Music Store and locate it in your Library even if the artist name is spelled slightly differently from the way it's spelled in other songs by the same artist. You can import compilation CDs, in which each track is by a different artist, and let each artist be listed in the Artist column separatelyeven to the point where your list of artists contains unwieldy composite entries like David Ogden Stiers, Mel Gibson, and Chorus or A. Caroldi, A. Alvarosi, Virginio Bianchi, E. Schiani, and A. Gerbi, as can happen when you import Broadway soundtracks or classical music CDs. Or you can leave the entire disc's Artist field labeled, simply but unhelpfully, as Various Artists. Chances are you'll still be able to find the music you want, one way or another. If not by artist name, for example, you can always find an album by name in the Album list. These inefficiencies in the original info tags might not bother you at all; after all, there's always another way to find what you want in iTunes, as you saw in Find and Play Music.

You might want to keep a few techniques in mind, though, beyond the ones covered by the tasks in this chapter, to help you keep your iTunes Library humming smoothly and efficiently. You can choose to ignore this advice, as you wishbut if you're bitten by the organization bug, as iTunes tends to inspire in people, you'll want to use these techniques to ensure that not just you can find all your music easily, but so can anyone else browsing your music, such as a remote iTunes user sharing your Library (as explained in Listen to Shared Music on the Local Network). Remember, what iTunes promotes is the legitimacy of the digital music medium. It wouldn't do to let people see your digital music collection in more disarray than your commercial CD collection!

Coalesce Artist Names

How is it spelled: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer? Emerson Lake & Palmer? ELP? Particularly if you have tracks by the band that you acquired as MP3 files over the Internet from various sources, you might have this Artist field set to any of a seemingly limitless variety of spellings of the band name. Browse through the Artist list, and you'll find that, in effect, the same band is listed several different times, each associated with only a small subset of the total tracks by that artist that you own.

Perhaps this doesn't bother you. But it should. What if a remote iTunes user thinks he's navigated into your vast collection of Emerson, Lake, & Palmer music, only to discover that a few tracks are missingnot realizing that they're actually listed under ELP? What if you forget how all the songs are labeled, and you go out and buy new copies of certain songs, not realizing that you already have them? It's common courtesy, to yourself and others (to say nothing of to Emerson, Lake, & Palmer) to organize all their music under the same band name so that it's all listed in the proper order, with a uniform level of respect for every song.

The Artist fields that differ so subtly from each other are set in the individual songs' info tags. iTunes automatically and instantly displays all variations in the Artist list as collected from the songs themselves, and the larger grouping structures (such as Artist and Album) don't exist independently of the song files. That makes it easier to keep things straight. All you have to do is fix a single song that has an aberrant spelling, and that spelling disappears from the listing, with the song snapping back into line with all the others by the same artist. An even better and more direct way to coalesce multiple spellings of an artist's name is to select all the songs by that artistwhether they're spelled correctly or notand edit them all at once to set their Artist fields to the same value.

Selecting multiple artist entries with spelling variations.

Choose multiple artist entries from the Artist list by holding down the Ctrl key (in Windows) or the key (on the Mac) as you click each one. The song listing area shows all the songs matching any of the selected artists. Don't click individual song entries to adjust them; instead, with the multiple artist groupings selected, choose File, Get Info. Click Yes in the dialog box that appears, confirming that you're sure you want to edit the information for multiple items.

In the Info window that appears, type the correct spelling of the artist name into the Artist field. iTunes fills in matching names from its database for you as you type. Keep typing the name with the exact spelling, punctuation, and capitalization you want to use for all the selected songs until the correct text string is shown in the text box. Don't change any of the other fields unless you want all of them to have the same value as well. (The Genre field is a good example of where this can be useful.) Click OK to commit the changes and set all the selected songs to the same artist name.

Notice that the number of artists listed in the Artist list has been reduced. If you had four different spellings for Emerson, Lake, & Palmer in the tracks in your iTunes database when you started, the Artist list now shows a number reduced by three. Now there's only one artist to select to get access to all your music by that same group.

Tip

iTunes can recognize that some letters are merely variations on others. For instance, if an artist name in a certain song differs from the artist name in other songs only by capitalization, there won't be two separate artist listings in the Artist column. Similarly, vowels are grouped into single character families regardless of accents or diacriticals; this means that as far as iTunes is concerned, Bjork is the same thing as Björk. The completist in you, if he's really assertive, might compel you to fix these discrepancies even if they don't cause superfluous listingsjust select the artist by clicking the entry in the Artist list, edit the info tags for all matching songs, and set the Artist field to the spelling you want to set for all the songs.


Reduce Genre Variations

Another area where it pays to reduce the needless complexity of your iTunes Library is the Genre column. There is no universally accepted standard format for the way genres are described; one set of songs might be listed as Hip-Hop, another as Hip-Hop/Rap, and another as rap,hip-hop,urban, depending entirely on who set the info tags in the songs in your Library. If you're navigating your music by Genre, there's no way to know in advance which heading the music you want will be under. The best policy is to coalesce your genre variations into single, more all-encompassing categories.

From the Genre list, select an entry that you want to merge with another, more general entry. For instance, suppose that you have two albums under Alternative Rock and 15 under Alternative. You want to change the two wayward albums to fall in with the larger grouping so that you can find all of them reliably in normal navigation, with a minimum of guesswork and blind hunting. Select Alternative Rock; then choose File, Get Info. Adjust the Genre field to read Alternative. (You can select it from the drop-down menu or type until iTunes fills in the matching name for you.) When you click OK, all the affected songs are updated, and the superfluous Alternative Rock Genre entry disappears, with the albums and artists that were inside it now folded into the more general Alternative listing. Now you stand a much better chance of finding the music you're looking for simply by picking the genre that looks most appropriate.

Organize Compilation Albums

What good is an album in which every track is by a different artist, especially if there are lots of different artists shown on each track, such as in an album of Broadway show tunes where each track's Artist field contains a list of all the vocalists who performed on it? It might be entirely correct to have all these independent listings set in the individual songs, but it wreaks havoc on your Artist list. Before you know it, the list is full of long, unreadable entries that are all but useless for navigating to the albums from which the songs originate.

An album with tracks by different artists, just aching to be marked as a Compilation album.

This is where the Compilation field comes into play. In iTunes, if you enable a special check box info tag called Part of a compilation, the song or album is organized in a different and much more useful way than normal songs or albums. Specifically, the entire album is found under a single Artist listing called Compilations, and all the individual and needlessly complex artist name entries are kept out of the Artist list. Similarly, the song files on the disk are organized into folders that are named for the album in which they appear, inside a folder called Compilations. This arrangement is much more efficient, whether you're navigating in iTunes or in the Finder or Windows Explorer, than digging into confusingly labeled folder trees named for long and complex artist names, only to find a single track inside each onethe only track matching that specific artist name. Compilations bring some sanity to albums where your only hope used to be to leave the tracks' Artist fields set to Various Artists, which isn't very helpful.

Navigate to an album whose tracks are all by different artists. (Use the Album listing to find it by name.) Select the album name from the list and then choose File, Get Info to modify all the tracks in that album at once. Select the Part of a compilation check box and click OK. The songs are updated; you shouldn't notice much change in iTunes, except that the number of individual artists in the Artist list has been reduced by the number of different artists on the album. Now you can adjust each of the Artist fields, putting as much information into each one as you want, and your music navigation won't be made any more complicated no matter how much unique information you add.

Note

For the Compilations grouping to be shown, be sure that the Group compilations when browsing check box is selected in the General tab of the iTunes Preferences window. (Choose iTunes, Preferences on the Mac and Edit, Preferences in Windows to display the Preferences window.) If this option isn't enabled, songs in compilation albums are organized into a Compilations folder in the file system, but all the individual artists show up in the iTunes Artist list. Similarly, on the iPod, navigate into the Settings menu and turn the Compilations setting to On.


Set Accurate Track and Disc Numbers

When you're browsing music in the Library view, it's often most useful to sort the songs based on the Album column. Doing so ensures not only that tracks are grouped together by the proper albums they come from, but also that they're secondarily sorted according to their track numbers within the albums. With this organization, you can easily play an album all the way through by simply selecting it from the Album list and clicking Play; the tracks play in their original album order.

This behavior is true, however, only if the Track Number field is properly set in each of the songs. This field can take one of two forms: a single number, or a two-part number that also includes the total number of tracks on the disc (such as 7 of 12). To ensure that the tracks are sorted properly, and to be able to set up Smart Playlists and other kinds of groupings based on the appropriate contents of these fields, it's important that each track has both its individual track number and the total number of tracks on the album set properly.

Select an album from the Album list. View the Track # column in the song listing area. If any of the tracks vary from the two-part 7 of 12 format, update them by setting the info tags. The best way to do this is to edit all the tags of the relevant tracks at once.

Choose File, Get Info. In the Track Number fields, set the second number (and only the second number) to the total number of songs on the album. Click OK to set this value in all the tracks. Then select each song individually for which the track number isn't filled in. Choose File, Get Info again and enter the appropriate track number for each song.

Multidisc sets are also handled best by iTunes when they have the appropriate info tags set. In this case, it's the Disc Number field. Suppose that you have a six-disc set of songs by a favorite band. In the ideal case, all you would have to do when playing this collection would be to select the single entry representing the entire six-disc collection from the Album list and click Play to play the whole thing from the beginning of the first disc to the end of the sixth. However, this usually isn't possible with discs imported using the basic information in the Gracenote database because the user-contributed information downloaded from there usually applies a superfluous suffix (such as [1/6]) to the album name for each disc instead of properly using the Disc Number fields. You can fix that, in what should be a familiar procedure by now.

First make sure that the individual disc number is set properly in each of the tracks. To do this, select an individual entry in the Album list representing a single disc in the set; choose File, Get Info, and set the first part of the Disc Number field pair to the appropriate number of the disc in the set. Click OK to save the changes to all the tracks on the disc. Repeat this step for all the discs in the set.

Multiple discs from a single set, exhibiting superfluous variations in the Album list.

Next, select all the different album entries representing the components of the three-disc set, holding down Ctrl (in Windows) or (on the Mac) as you click each one. Choose File, Get Info. First set the Album field to an appropriate name for the entire collection, without suffixes indicating the number of discs. Then fill in the second part of the Disc Number field pair, indicating the number of discs in the set (in this example, 6). Click OK to save this information. Notice that the entries in the Album list collapse together into a single neat entry. Selecting this single entry shows you all the tracks from beginning to end within the collection, spanning all six discs in order. That's the way this kind of music was meant to work!

Note

Certain kinds of media files, such as podcasts and videos purchased through the iTunes Music Store, are organized and automatically sorted by info tag fields that are not editable (such as Season and Episode #). Their category names often correspond to the Genre setting (such as TV Shows or Movies), but changing the Genre field does not affect the way they're listed in iTunes. This is one drawback to the usability of these kinds of files in iTunes. The fields might be made editable if enough users express a need for it. In the meantime, Mac users can use Lostify (http://home.comcast.net/~lowellstewart/lostify/) to modify these fields.


Work with Classical Music

There's one type of music that iTunes simply handles poorly: classical music. iTunes just isn't designed for that genre. iTunes was developed with the modern organizational structure of popular music in mind: albums by individual artists containing a dozen or so songs each. This led to an obvious hierarchical structure for your Library, with tracks grouped beneath albums, which are then grouped into artists and then genres. Yet when you think about the way classical music is structured, it could hardly be any more different.

First of all, in classical music, the composer is far more important than the performer, which is usually defined as a certain symphony orchestra led by a certain conductor or featuring certain soloists. iTunes provides a Composer field, but it's not available as one of the Browse lists. The situation just gets worse from there.

The concept of an "album" didn't exist in classical times, and instead of a dozen songs grouped into an album by a specific artist, the closest thing to it was a "work" (a symphony, concerto, or suite) consisting of only a few comparatively long pieces (or movements). These "works" were sometimes standalone bodies of music, but as often as not they were thought of as being part of a longer and ongoing lifelong body of work by the composer, or as entries in a series of themed works for a certain patron or sponsor. To make matters still worse, these bodies of work are usually listed only by long, esoteric strings of numbers and identifiers, such as Beethoven's String Quartet no. 9 in C op.59 "Rasumovsky" no. 3. Just imagine how that would look on an iPod!

Web Resource

http://alanlittle.org/weblog/ClassicalID3.html

Alan Little discusses the ramifications of organizing classical music in the modern digital music paradigm.


Unfortunately, there's no good solution for this situation. iTunes and the iPod just aren't built for classical music. You can listen to digital versions of your classical music collection in iTunes just fineit's just finding the music that's a problem. You can use the Search bar to find music by a certain composer, or you can navigate the Album list to find the name of a work by its commonly known name (such as Holst's The Planets). But for music without the benefit of an easily readable and concise work title by which to find it, there's not a lot of recourse.

One possibility is to decide on an easily identifiable name for a given body of workif one doesn't exist in common discourse, make one up if you have toand assign that name to the Album field for the music. Don't adhere too closely to whatever name was assigned to the CD on which the music was publishedmore often than not, classical music CDs contain more than one work, often by different composers entirely. Instead, set your own name for the work, such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It might not be very satisfying to classical music purists to see it listed in this way, but at least you'll be able to find it.

You can use the Grouping field as another method for organizing your classical music works. Although it isn't used in any of the Browse lists and is not exposed in any of iTunes' standard navigation methods, groupings can be used to gather the tracks of a classical work together even if their other fields are set to unhelpful values. For example, set the Grouping fields of all the tracks of a work to a well-known name, such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; repeat the process for each of your classical works. Then you can create Smart Playlists based on the contents of the Grouping field and use the Shuffle setting (in the Playback section of the iTunes Preferences window) to cause iTunes to skip from one set of tracks with the same Grouping value to another, rather than from song to song or from album to album.

Note

You can put the full, correctly formatted work title in the Comments field of the tracks on the album. If iTunes is updated in the future to better handle classical music, you can reorganize these tracks with the syntactically proper titles in front of you for easy reference.





iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap
iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328992
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 150
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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