iTunes organizational issue

I’m rather frustrated with iTunes right now.

Basically, I have a fair number of soundtracks. Movies, broadway shows, whatever.

In cases where the CDDB has artists for a particular track, it stores the individual songs in folders for those artists. The example I’m looking at now is the soundtrack for Aladdin. Robin Williams played the Genie. So, for his songs, they are stored in /robin williams/aladdin/songname.mp3.

Kind of obnoxious, as I really want the album all stored in one place, not as ‘singles’ by each artist.

Is there any way around this, while retaining iTunes’ organizational scheme?

In a related question, if I have three albums called ‘greatest hits,’ if I sort by album it thinks they are all the same album, thus all the track ones are together, then all the track twos. In my case I have Greatest Hits (by Queen), Greatest Hits (Bob Dylan) and Greatest Hits (Elton John). So I get to see Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, followed by Your Song, followed by We Will Rock You, followed by Blowin’ in the Wind, followed by Daniel, followed by We Are The Champions… you get the idea. Anyway around this?

You can select a whole pile of tracks and tell iTunes that they are a compilation by grouping them (once you’ve selected them all, right click and select ‘Get Info’ and there is a tick box for Grouping). I think that may be the start to your solution but I don’t have the whole answer sorry.

What I do to avoid the splitting of an album by individual artists’ names is to (laboriously) put the artist’s name in the title, after a slash or in parentheses. Once I’ve done that, I select all the tracks, right-click/get-info, and give all the tracks a single consistent artist name. For some of them, like my Folkway recordings, this means putting the editor’s name; for others it means putting the title of the album in twice.

Not a very elegant solution, but it gets the job done.

(This is an especially annoying problem with a lot of hip-hop albums, which seem to have an annoyingly high percentage of collaborations. A Cee-Lo Green album, or Missy, will split itself into 8 or 10 different artist’s names.)

I don’t know if this will help or not, but the new iTunes 7 just released has a new “Album Artist” tag separate from the “Artist” tag.

Awesome! They musta been readin my mind!

What the “Compilation” tag groups all albums with that tag under the “Compilations” folder, so all the tracks from the same album are in the same folder rather than being in separate album folders under separate artist folders.

I also noticed the new “Album Artist” tag in iTunes 7. After some experimentation, I found out that this doesn’t affect which folders the tracks are placed. However, it does affect how tracks are displayed in the new album artwork view. Without “Album Artist”, the view defaults to grouping the same artists together. If you have an album with multiple artists, then you’ll see multiple groupings (one for each artist on the album) with the same album artwork. If you set an “Album Artist”, then all tracks with the same album and album artist are grouped together. Again, this doesn’t affect the physical location of tracks on your hard drive (for that you’ll have to set “Compilation” as above), but rather how they are displayed and grouped in iTunes.

Didn’t notice this question previously.

I’ve experimented some more with iTunes 7. It seems this problem has been fixed. Albums from different artists are grouped together by artist even if they have the same album name and you sort by album. This works in both list view and album view.

Ah. It didn’t work for me, but then I realised that there are three different album views; album, album by year, and album by artist. For two of those three views it displayed like I mentioned previously, but for album by artist it does solve the problem.

I just hadn’t seen those options, as they become available by clicking on the album column a few times.