iPod I want more organization...

[dhlvrsn]

Ok. I've tried to ensure that there is a new iPod anounced next week. I bought an 80GB December 26th. The question that I have is how to get my albums organized properly in iTunes. I've got a couple of albums that have the same name and the the songs are shuffled. I've got some albums with different artist (soundtrack, compilations etc.) where some stay together as albums and some are split apart into individual songs. Some of my single artist albums split apart if there is an additional artist on one song. It's kind of a mess.

I tried searching the forum but the only responce that I found was let iTunes do it for you. It's all automatic.

Thanks,

Dale

 

[SpookTheHamster]

What I normally do with soundtracks is set the artist name the same as the album name, and put the artist after the song title. With featured artists, I also put it in the song title.

If you're talking about when iTunes randomly splits albums for no reason, you can solve that by selecting every song from the album, renaming it to anything and then renaming it to what you want.

If the songs are in the wrong order, check the track numbers.

 

[kalisphoenix]

Ok. I've tried to ensure that there is a new iPod anounced next week. I bought an 80GB December 26th. The question that I have is how to get my albums organized properly in iTunes. I've got a couple of albums that have the same name and the the songs are shuffled. I've got some albums with different artist (soundtrack, compilations etc.) where some stay together as albums and some are split apart into individual songs. Some of my single artist albums split apart if there is an additional artist on one song. It's kind of a mess.

I tried searching the forum but the only responce that I found was let iTunes do it for you. It's all automatic.

Thanks,

Dale

This might not work for you, but I'm a meticulous tagger.

One of the ways I organize is by the album's original date of release -- so I went on allmusic and Wikipedia and tried to find as much of this information as I could, then putting the YYYYMMDD (replacing unknowns with 0's and appending a question mark to the end if I don't know the month or day) in the "Grouping" tag. That's my way of dealing with albums with the same name (one that comes to mind are the two albums by Fleetwood Mac called Fleetwood Mac).

I have 120GB (>15,600 songs), so I've eaten my own dog food

It can actually be pretty fun. Finding the album artwork, the actual song names, and the trivia provided about the albums on Wikipedia/Allmusic is relaxing to me.

Edit: Oops, misunderstood the question. Put additional artists in the track name, not the artist name. Or use the Album Artist tag

 

[swiftaw]

Ok. I've tried to ensure that there is a new iPod anounced next week. I bought an 80GB December 26th. The question that I have is how to get my albums organized properly in iTunes. I've got a couple of albums that have the same name and the the songs are shuffled. I've got some albums with different artist (soundtrack, compilations etc.) where some stay together as albums and some are split apart into individual songs. Some of my single artist albums split apart if there is an additional artist on one song. It's kind of a mess.

I tried searching the forum but the only responce that I found was let iTunes do it for you. It's all automatic.

Thanks,

Dale

Ok,

Problem 1: Distinguishing multiple albums with the same name. Not much you can do here except rename one of the albums to something different. Generally if I have two albums of the same name, I append the artist name in brackets to the end of the album title.

Problem 2: Keeping a whole album together when it features different artists. For example, all tracks are by artist X except for one track by artist X featuring artist Y. Make sure the album artist field for the whole album is set to "artist X" . This should keep everything grouped together.

 

[dhlvrsn]

Excellent! I had hoped for a way of just selecting the songs and reminding iTunes that it was one album. This is working great. I've only got about 6K songs so it will be a while before I'm finished. I'm just excited to put all those jewel cases into storage!

Now is there anyway to get rid of some the wrong artwork that iTunes downloads...

 

[Cinematographer]

Now is there anyway to get rid of some the wrong artwork that iTunes downloads...

Select all the songs with the wrong artwork. Right-click (CTRL-click) on them. Choose "Erase downloaded artwork" (or anything similar in English). The artwork of the selcted songs will be gone.

Maybe next time it will find the right cover, maybe not. That's why I made three playlists:

Album art right
Album art wrong
Album art missing

Just to keep it under control.

 

[bit density]

This works for me with things like soundtracks and stuff.

Select the compilation button in info. This tends to put the albums together.