I’ve spent Christmas Vacation burning about 300 CDs into iTunes, and I’m running into a problem. It seems that iTunes isn’t recognizing an artist consistently. For example - I’ve burned maybe 15 Jimmy Buffett CDs. Some of them group under “Jimmy Buffett,” while others stand alone as “Jimmy Buffett.” A few even kick out one song as its own entry. How do I get them to all register as the same artist? I’ve tried re-entering them with the same info, but it doesn’t seem to work.
Any tricks I’m missing that are really obvious? Or is this just Apple being Apple?
Not sure exactly what your issue is - but my first suggestion would be to select all the tracks, and then group edit the info so they all have the same
Artist (including "sort as - you probably want “Buffett, Jimmy”)
Album Artist (including "sort as - you probably want “Buffett, Jimmy”)
Composer (I leave blank)
Grouping (I leave blank)
Genre
Media Kind (should be “Music”)
“Compilation” status (should be “off”)
It’s not Apple. iTunes pulls that information from a third-party database, and it’s less than rigorous in tagging artists consistently across releases. Zombiewoof’s suggestions should help you out.
I have experienced all kinds of glitches with iTunes over the years. Early on, I gave up relying on iTunes to pull track and album information accurately, so I always re-type every entry myself in order to make sure it’s correct. I have about 10,000 tracks now, most of which I have done by hand.
Even then, it sometimes fails to recognize that two entries are exactly the same, and I have to go through it again, either by selecting a group of tracks and changing their information together (with the Get Information “cmd-I” keystroke) or changing them one-by-one in a series.
Sorting properly is a completely different issue. I use all the “sort” data fields and I make sure that when the artist is a name of a person that it sorts by family name first. And I sort albums by the name of the album artist and year of release instead of by the name of the album.
I found a solution, if anybody else is having this problem. It’s a work-around, but involves changing every sort field for an artist to “x,” then back to the proper name using autofill. Seems to work, so that’s what I’m running with.
Who knew ripping a few(hundred) CDs would be such a chore?
Just like to add that these sorts of problems are the kind of things that drive us non-Apple, PC-using folk crazy*!* iTunes and its supposedly ‘helpful’ presumptuousness… :mad:
I used to use an app called “dBpoweramp” - it would pull the meta-data from four different sources and let you pick one, or mix and match from among the four, or type your own info in. Very easy to use.
It also ripped two files in two different formats simultaneously - I did one file in loss-less format for archival reasons and one in standard 192 kps mp3 format for my portable devices.
I’ve been doing the same thing, as I somehow managed to lose a large portion of my ripped music a few years ago when I changed computers. Haven’t had your problem, though. The only annoying thing for me is when they mislabel the genre. For instance, calling a jazz artist ‘pop’ is just wrong, and it screws up playback when I’m doing random jazz or blues. It’s an easy fix if you catch it, but I’ve probably missed some. On the plus side, I’m nearly to the end of my giant box of CDs.
