OK, I got my first ever ipod for Chirstmas and I’ve got about half my collection ripped (about 20g). But I’ve noticed some weird things when I look for music. On itunes, all the artists are listed, even the ones that are on compilations. On the ipod, the artists on compilations aren’t listed and there are certain artists that don’t show up at all. For example, I have two albums by Billy Bragg, a three CD best of and another disc. But I have no listing for Billy Bragg on my ipod and I don’t understand why. I’ve noticed the same problem with other artists. Any ideas why?
I’ve noticed my iPod tends to do strange things with different artists that carry the same album name. Sepcifically, I had two “Greatest Hits” albums by two different artists which were listed perfectly fine in iTunes, but not on the iPod. It seems the sort on the iPod doesn’t handle same-album-name/different artist well at all, so if you have compilations that carry the same name, that could be the same problem. I wound up renaming the album titles to include the artist name to get around this.
Under Settings>Main Menu (on your ipod) if you check Compilations you may find they show up. In itunes right-click one of the Billy Bragg songs and see if the compilation box is selected, a lot of Greatest Hits packages are like that. Personally, I never use the compilations option but I had the same issue when I first started using my ipod.
That’s it, both albums were listed as compilations for some reason. Thanks, I still don’t totally understand how the organization on this thing works.
This is a consequence of the way tagging has been handled. Each Audio file has some non-musical data stored in it, called a tag. A file can be part of an album, in which case there is Tag data for Album, Album Artist and Track Title. Alternatively, the file could be part of a compilation album, in which case it will have (in addition to the previous tags) a Performing Artist tag. This data is retrieved from the internet during the ripping process (or manually entered if it is not available).
iTunes[sub]TM[/sub] (a loathsome piece of software which I only use to actually update hardware) possibly uses Album Artist for it’s view of the library, while the iPod[sub]TM[/sub] itself may use Performing Artist if it is present. You can retag files to remove compilation data (I often do this, as I am usually primarily interested in Album Artist - but I have a number of albums with Various - Classical as the album artist - all the albums get put under the same folder).
Hope the explanation helps - I am a bit anal about tagging my music files.
Si
iPod and iTunes organize music in the exact same way. “Album Artist” is primarily there for search features. I would prefer everything were displayed by “album artist”, so I could actually have the different artists featured in a song listed in the artist tag without having twelve hundred entries for “jay-z ft (fill in the blank)”, but c’est la’ vie.
To take out compilation data, you simply highlight all the songs in an album, right click, hit “info”, and there is a box at the bottom for marking if something is a compilation or not. The preference menu has a place for changing if itunes display all compilations under the same “Compilation” menu.
Don’t ask me what “sort artist” or all that business is, though. I haven’t got a clue.
“Sort Artist” is pretty much what it sounds like; if you click on the “Artist” heading of the music list to sort by the artist name, it will use the “Sort Artist” field for the sorting, if present.
For example, a recent change to iTunes (for reasons unknown) changed it so that numerals are sorted to the end, instead of the beginning. I have albums from a band called “707” that I was used to seeing at the top of my list. The change caused them to now be at the bottom of the list. So I put “aaa” into the “Sort Artist” field and now 707 is again at the top of the list.
But does it ever-so-helpfully organize your bands by genre into “Alternative” and “Rock”, like Windows Media Player does? (Which is weird cause it seems to have several different genres for electronica.)
Next week I’m gonna put in Second Stage Turbine Blade to see what genre it places it in (the last 2 Coheed and Cambria albums were propertly filed under “rock”, but TSSTB should be “Alternative” if those are the only two choices.)
When you right-click an album and select Get Info you can change the genre to whatever you please; there are options in the drop-down box but you can type in your own. I don’t remember what Second Stage Turbine Blade came up as when I added it but I filed all the Coheed & Cambria albums as Alternative/Rock on my ipod.
This is why when I rip a CD into iTunes, I always enter all the data manually. And I fill in all the “sort” fields so that people don’t get sorted by their first names. Plus I don’t trust the people whose data iTunes has aggregated. There are invariably errors.
I can do that, it’s just weird to see most of my record collection basically bifurcated down the middle for little apparent reason while others get microscopically minute differences taken into account. Then again I never really sort by genre other than to see what Microsoft thinks it is 