Keeping music in order in iTunes

Hi BigH,

there can be many reasons causing you problem. Most of these reasons will be in small tagging problems. I have been using iTunes extensively in the past and know that it might be a bit tricky in the beginning, but also that it works perfectly once all settings/tagging is done correct.

thebest I could recommend, is that you google for the iLounge website. There are a number of very good docs in the Tutorial section. The docs are very understandable, not too long and give the exact right information to organize your iTunes library. It will solve your issue quickly !

Iver

Do you want to sort by year within album artist 

View :: Sort Albums :: By Artists ✓ Ascending ✓ By Year ✓ 

Alternative use View :: List  - the first column title says Album, click on the column title and it will change to Album by Artist, click again and it'll change to Album/Artist by Year. 

Not perfect, but it might help

Click HERE and have a read - you can put the date in the sort field. 

NO these options are not what I want. If I select artists with many albums I want the albums to stay in year order. I can change that by clicking on the top of the  year column, ie ascending or descending , but this does not stay and when I go back some time it has reverted to previous setting.

I have my albums in Grid view, that does not seem to allow options.

Guido, as always you are very helpful! Thanks for the link.

Go in to Grid view 

Hold down the Ctrl Key and click that mouse 

Up pops a box .... select sort albums and then By Artists ✓ Ascending ✓ By Year ✓

Say the magic words Mick McCarthy

This should stay permanently as your grid view preferences 

If you go to Chas &  Dave then your first listed album sgould be One Fing 'n' Annuver then Rockney then Don't Give a Monkeys and so on up to From Tottenham to Tennessee then finally 100 Hits

That is just an example It works for other groups too. 

Hope this helps, Guy 

ITune likes to organize the music folders (on your hard disk) in some specific way, with one folder for each artist, and a subfolder for each record. If you allow iTune to « keep music organized », and e.g. change (using iTune) the spelling of some artist name, then iTune will modify the corresponding folder name accordingly.

IMHO iTune is a very primitive data management tool, definitively not suitable for a large collection of classical music records. Fixing the record tags is a hassle, and iTune has only very primitive options to select ond  / or sort your records.

The way iTunes organises the file system doesn't effect how you view it. It uses

[Album} Artist::Album::Track

but it has no way of knowing that ELO and Electric Light Orchestra are in the same, so you'll get two directory structures.

If you have an album that has tracks by Alexis Korner, Alexis Korner & Blues Incorporated and CCS - then setting the Album Artist to Alexis Korner will ensure all the tracks go in the same directory. 

The problem with classical music is the computer version of filing it in a record cabinet. Especially if has multiple works on it. At least with iTunes you can split it in to two albums. 

So Beethoven/Böhm & Mozart/Hogwood if paired on a CD can plit into a Beethoven/Böhm album and a Mozart/Hogwood album. If you decide as I would that Böhm and Hogwood are the artists and Beethoven and Mozart are the composers. Then 

Böhm::Ninth::Track

Hogwood::No. 40::Track

Would be you directory structure ... no mention of the great composers. 

However, in the iTunes interface all is well ... as clicking on Composer in grid view will show all you Beethoven and Mozart works together. 

Agreed it is fairly primitive, but it works well enough ... how would improve it?

Beethoven::Böhm::Ninth::Track

This would the look odd in a non-classical ... so trying to find a schema that meets every requirement is an interesting challenge. 

However, BigH is a folk-rocker at heart so I think he just wants all his Richard Thompson albums in chronological order .... I put mine under the genre Folk/Fairport Convention ... so if I click on Fairport I can see his work in the group and solo  ... it is annoying I can just put Fairport Convention, but genre thumbnails look odd if I don't and change these is a right pain. 

Perhaps what iTunes needs is an Advanced Search option, where you could search any tag. 

I can't see these options Guido has posted about.

What is needed is how things work in music collectoer all the options are available and you put them in the order YOU want them. 

ie Artist Title Year  etc, in fact I just have Artist Year and seems to be able to list as I want.

I am using iTune with my iPad (using the Remote.app) and this has many shortcomings, including:

I would like to sort artists or composers by last name and not by first name.

Tags for conductor, orchestra, and choir are missing.

I am missing the option to select e.g. high res records.

I am missing the option to rate records and display for example records with at least one star.

A record can have many artists; a record by Phill Collins and Siouxsie should appear both among PC records and Siouxsie records.

I am missing the possibility to select e.g. all Alna Berg Lulu versions I own and nothing else.

My iTunes is arranged Artist Year .... Are you doing a Ctrl Click on the Artist column header while viewing by artists in Grid? This definitely works on my version. Can't see any other version behaving differently. 

I have never used music collector, but it does seem a good way to do it .... Perhaps iTunes will do that in the next release. 

ITunes uses ID3 tags, but not all of them. If you search for Collins in my library then you will find lots by Shirley, Dolly, even Mel, but not one by a drummer with that surname. 

However, you can construct artist strings that contain orchestra/conductor/choir 

There are also playlists. 

You can enter the name as Collins, Shirley if you wish to sort by surname ... It would be difficult for iTunes to second guess the surname and for example to know that Deep Purple was not a Mr Purple with Christain name Deep. 

So i think you could achieve some what you want using the current tags, but i agree there is room for improvement ... The Meridian Sooloos is excellent in this respect - list all the albums on which Richard Thompson plays guitar would do just that. It might even bring up a surprise in that he played guitar of Mike heron's Smilin' Men album, but not a lot of people know that.

the remote.app is more limited than the iTunes interface.

Lets hope for some improvements in ITunes 11. 

I'm not very good at explaining this, but hopefully the picture above might help. It does the same thing as the method I tried, but failed, to describe earlier. I leave it to others if this attempt doesn't work. The screen shot above is taken from the Windows version of iTunes (which I found on the Internet), but it works in just the same way on a proper computer. 

This what I tried to explain 

With the iPad there is, as far as I understand, no way to select albums using playlist. All you get is (guess what) a play list, namely a list of tracks.

Using iTune on the computer by contrast you can select albums using playlists, not on the iPad.

My impression is that iTune for music, like iPhoto for pictures, is more a toy than a serious data management software.

OK Guido I've found it I was still in artist view not album.

Thanks.

Of course!  Apple's products are meant for a typical consumer profile with little IT knowledge and lots of money to spend on electronic toys.

Bar for a few professional pieces of software and hardware, Apple is a toy factory.

The iPads (actually everything "i...") are first and foremost - toys.

I have an iPad, and an Air and ....  And these are all my - toys.

so take it from there.

Bobby