iTunes album grouping problem

[Jelle Fresen]

Hi all,

I'm trying to make an AppleScript to clean up my mp3 tags, but during this development I stumbled upon a rather curious use case where I am clueless as to how the metadata should be filled in properly. To be honest, it is only hypothetical, but it forces me to think thoroughly about the meaning of certain metadata.

Suppose I have two albums, and I want iTunes to group all tracks of one album together, and all tracks of the other album together. This should be the case in all 4 viewing options (as List, as Album List, as Grid and as Cover Flow). However, in this particular use case both albums happen to have the same name: "Greatest Hits of the 90's". Being greatest hits albums, all tracks are typically of different artists. And to make it even more ambiguous, both albums will have 15 tracks.

Now, the problem is, how can I make any difference between the two albums? If I make all tracks 'Part of a compilation', iTunes will group all 30 tracks in one album called "Greatest Hits of the 90's". I cannot set an album artist, because there is intrinsically no single artist that created and/or is associated with the album. Putting 'Various artists' in there leads to the same problem as the compilation flag. iTunes cannot even distinguish between the albums by looking at the total number of tracks, since that is similar as well.

The way I see it, I can only think of one elegant solution: use the International Standard Recording Code. However, iTunes doesn't seem to use this particular ID3 frame (see 4.2.1 of the ID3v2.4 informal standard).
A workaround that would suffice for now may be to distinguish the albums by album name, such as "Greatest ... 90's (1)" and "Greatest ... 90's (2)", but that would not be very elegant.

So, my question in this particular use case is what would be the best way to tag these mp3 files?
And more in general, if I try to query the library through AppleScript, how do I select all tracks of a single album, without the possibility of accidentally selecting too many or too few tracks, such as would be very likely in the previous use case?

Kind regards,
Jelle Fresen

 

[GGJstudios]

If they are two discs of the same album, enter numbers in the Disk tag. If not, set the Album Artist to Various Artists and make the album names unique. You don't necessarily have to use:

"Greatest Hits of the 90's (1)"
"Greatest Hits of the 90's (2)"​

But you could use:

"Greatest Hits of the 90's"
"Greatest Hits of the 90s" (note the missing apostrophe, making this title unique)​

Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes is a great resource for managing your iTunes tags and files.

 

[Jolly Giant]

also have a look at this excellent read by Steve MacGuire.

 

[ReggaeFire]

Have you tried putting slightly different names in the "Sort Album" tag? The Sort tags take priority over the plain Artist/Album Artist/Album tags.

 

[Jelle Fresen]

@GGJstudios: no, in this hypothetical case the discs belong to different albums, e.g. they are produced by different labels. And about Doug's Applescripts, I was actually modifying one of his scripts to fit my needs

@Jolly Giant: thanks, this is exactly the sort of read I was looking for.

@ReggaeFire: I haven't tried it, but according to the read of Steve MacGuire, that won't help to differentiate the two albums. (see the second subsection)

Thanks for your contributions. Based on those and the article of Steve MacGuire, I think the bottom line is that a differentiation must be made in either the album name or the album artist. Maybe I should add the name of the label to the album name, e.g. "Greatest Hits of the 90's [Disky]" vs "... [Telst]". So, in more general terms, I think the equivalence relation between tracks of the same album is defined as having the same album artist and the same album name.

Kind regards,
Jelle

 

[GGJstudios]

I think the equivalence relation between tracks of the same album is defined as having the same album artist and the same album name.

That's right. An album is determined by "Album" and "Album Artist" being identical for all tracks.