iTunes Music Sorting

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Skizzy

Supreme [H]ardness
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Nov 28, 2006
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Ugh, iTunes music sorting is frustrating. I have like 90 albums by the same artist, or so iTunes seems to think so. Is there a way I can consolidate this into fewer albums, not going one-by-one? That would take forever. One would think you could select those albums and combine them or something.

I've tried Googling this, and I don't really know what to search for, but it seems nothing is working. If I bought all my music from iTunes, this might be easier, but it's music I've had from the past, just drag+dropped into iTunes.

Any suggestions? Is there a third-party program that changes the tag of the files so they're the same or something? Thanks in advance.
 
Yeah, this still isn't doing what I want it to do. There's nothing that will find the albums automatically from the song names or artists? And then I still have a bunch of different windows folders for the artists and 'Unknown Albums' I'd like to consolidate. Drag and drop doesn't cut it.
 
heh, im in the same boat.. except i have 10k+ songs and 1500+ albums the problem is, my music player for some odd reason added a 00 or 01 to the file names depending on the song so i have 2 and 3 (and up to 6) copies of the same song... and on top of that a bunch of them are miss tagged... the only way i can seem to sort them is to open them up and listen to them..
 
All my stuff started on Windows (sorry) and I used MP3Tag (free) to set all me metatags. I really haven't found an equivalent on the Mac.
 
There is no equivalent for OS X, unfortunately. The best you can do would be to VM it.

Something to keep in mind is that iTunes uses album artist for sorting, not artist. Considering that the artist field is for the track artist, this behavior makes sense. Make sure the BAND field is used properly and album sorting will work correctly. Otherwise, you have a big mess on your hands.

You can use iTunes to tag, by the way. Just right click and select 'Get Info'. Select multiple files to apply the same data to multiple files (album, year, genre, album artist and so forth).
 
I've recently transcoded a few thousand songs from FLAC to LAME mp3 and done hand-tagging on almost all of it to ensure the shit is correct and then imported them into iTunes 9 and let iTunes add artwork (if it can/could find it, which it did about 95% of the time; I did it manually for the rest).

One thing I've noted is that because some songs repeat (same song on the original album, in a live album, on some compilation, a greatest hits, etc) I've had to go and alter the tags to fit. There's really no automagic way to do this, it's gotta be done manually, unfortunately.

Something like MusicBrainz Picard can be an exceptional tool for tagging a wide variety of stuff as it uses digital fingerprints of the actual mp3 or whatever files (mp3 is the best format for this purpose because of sheer popularity - almost all data in online databases is coming from mp3 files, not AAC or FLAC or anything else, something to keep in mind).

But, one thing that I've noted is that if you have compilation discs, it's A DAMNED GOOD IDEA to go into the "Get info" properties of tracks on said albums, and make sure the track(s) are enabled for "Part of a compilation" which causes iTunes to sort them manually and gets them out of the "Unknown artist" folders.

On a single track the compilation checkbox is on the Info tab, but if you select all the tracks off an album and "Get info" you have to go to the Options tab, to the "Part of a compilation" drop menu, and check the box AND change it to Yes to get it to stick/work.

Because of this, my "Unknown Artist\Unknown Album" folder is absolutely empty - if I don't check that compilation box (even for albums all done by the same artist) I'll end up with a ton of stuff in that "Unknown Artist" folder even when the artist name is known and the album title too.

Weird but that's how I get around the issues. 2,300+ songs and not one of 'em is "Unknown" in any respect.

I'm very simple with tags as well; I stripped everything out of every mp3 file - every tag, gone - with Tag & Rename and then redid 'em all with only the basic info that matters to me: Artist, Title, Album, Year, Genre, and Track Number. The rest of the tags I could care less about and tend to muck up different programs somewhere down the line, and I use a <track number>(space)<title>.mp3 filename format.

Can't get much simpler...

But if you must do massive amounts of tagging operations, Tag & Rename is the app of choice that I'd recommend. MusicBrainz Picard is fantastic for finding tags on tracks from their original sources because of the digital fingerprints, then you can clean things up with Tag & Rename if needed. A nice One-Two punch combo with those apps.
 
Skizzy said:
Ugh, iTunes music sorting is frustrating. I have like 90 albums by the same artist, or so iTunes seems to think so. Is there a way I can consolidate this into fewer albums, not going one-by-one? That would take forever. One would think you could select those albums and combine them or something.
Click to expand...

This is a pretty vague description of the problem. Are you saying that you have multiple albums that are fragmented with one or two songs per listing? If so, then you need to fill out the Album Artist tag, and ideally both the track and disc number fields as well. That sort of duplication occurs because iTunes defaults to sorting by artist, so when an album has multiple artists, it fragments the album into multiple listings. The Album Artist tag was created to solve this.

If that's not the problem, then a clearer description is in order.
 
From what I'm reading, file naming and the original mp3 meta tags weren't correctly done.

From the original rip, if you keep the artist-album-track-title information intact, then you shouldn't have to face this issue. Yes, a renaming program can help a lot if the mp3 isn't named properly and doesn't allow a mass retagging.

I've dealt with 48 gig of old time radio mp3 files which have been a total disaster in terms of naming conventions (they change from series to series and even within a series), mp3 tagging has, for the most part, been absent. Between a bulk renaming program and mp3tag . . . well, it still took some time (especially when filenames are just one big ass word).
 
I use MetaX to tag my ripped DVD's on my Mac. It definitely does Film and TV Shows and even links you to TagChimp or something like that to look for pre-made info. It's pretty easy to tag and entire TV series by just changing a few things for each file and letting it get on with a whole stack of stuff in the background.

Pretty sure it does music too but I'd check it out first. It's definitely a must have for video anyway.

EDIT: No music. Just checked. Get it for video though, it rocks.
 
Just curious, Finkus, do you have two right-click Open With entries for MetaX for MP4s? For whatever reason, I ended up with two entries. No clue why.
 
I fought with iTunes for a couple of months after I got my Touch for Christmas...simp[ly because it didnt like how I had MY albums labeled...which was correctly via Tag&Rename.

Now, take this for what its worth, but I dont use iTunes for my entire collection...its not that great a piece of software in my opinion...its to "bloated" since it is a manager, editor, player, store etc,etc,ect... I ONLY use iTunes to manage a select few albums and ripped movies for use on my Touch...a;; other music duties are handled by other pieces of software.

To get iTunes to display my albums, artists and tracks correctly, I had to painstakingly go through each album/folder and make sure all the tags were correct across all the tracks...if there is any variation in the tracks of a single album, it will cause iTunes to display it separately from the corresponding tracks of that album...a real pain in the ass!

I would hate to have to sit and wait for iTunes to add all my music to its library...296gb..all full albums, the majority is 320 rips...so i just use Foobar when I want to listen to some tunes...lol:D
 
BodyBagz said:
To get iTunes to display my albums, artists and tracks correctly, I had to painstakingly go through each album/folder and make sure all the tags were correct across all the tracks...if there is any variation in the tracks of a single album, it will cause iTunes to display it separately from the corresponding tracks of that album
Click to expand...
That seems like proper behavior. You'd have to deal with the same thing if you were sorting by tags in foobar as opposed to by folder in the library list.
 
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