So when I got my ipod a couple years back I noticed that if I sorted by artist I had like 20 different entries for Dr. Dre due to the fact that for some stupid fucking reason Itunes was including each credited artist on each song as it’s own entry under Dr. Dre (and any other rap artist). Example: You won’t find Nuthin But a G Thang under Dr. Dre. You will find it under Dr.Dre/Snoop Dogg. Now, this breaks the albums up across 5-15 different artists in some instances because of rappers need to include 50 guest rappers on their albums.
So I went thru and manually changed all the “artist” tags of the offending songs to “Dr. Dre” or whatever other main artist released the album. Then I could find the entire Chronic album under Artist Dr. Dre. I had to do this to 80-100 songs one at a time because you can’t bulk change tags in Itunes. Fine. When it was done it was done.
But…
When I installed Itunes 7 it decided to go back thru and rename ALL of the original artists back to the original state. So now I have like 20 entries for 50-Cent because he has a different rapper on every song.
Why the fuck did that stupid ass program have to make changes I didn’t ask for?
And why the hell are contributing artists considered in the main artist sort anyway? ID3 tags have an ALBUM ARTIST for the main artist and CONTRIBUTING ARTIST field for all the homies or whatever.
I ONLY have this issue with rap albums. Rock albums can do it correctly for some reason.
Fucking frustrating. Now I have to go BACK thru and change them all again.
I hate that on my iPod in the artists list, for example I will see this:
Beck
Beck
The Features
The Features
etc
Wtf?
No matter what I do it always happens with at least 5 artists. My headphones have been shot for awhile so I haven’t used or charged my iPod, but I remember the Beck duplicates being all his songs under each one. I think the others might be that way too.
There might be a space after one of your Becks. Try batch-changing all your Beck tracks at the same time.
As for the OP, I don’t know why that happened. I’ve manually changed the artist on many, many tracks–yeah, mostly hiphop trax–but when I changed to iTunes 7, they all stayed as is. You musta had some obscure box checked or something.
You can find the album in the browser. Go to View and then Show Browser to show the browser. Then just keep Artist set to All and find the album Chronic under Album.
If you don’t want to have to scroll through the entire list of albums, you can do this:
Choose Dr.Dre/Snoop Dogg under artist, which makes the browser show only albums by that artist
Click on Cronic under Album
Under Artist, set it back to All
Here’s how you can edit the tags of several songs at once:
In the main iTunes window, select a track
Hold control and left click on each additional track you want to change
Right click on one of them and click Get Info, and you can change the stuff in there.
If the tracks you want to change are lined up in a row, just select the first track and shift-leftclick on the last one instead of control-leftclicking each individual one.
it is possible to change information for several iTunes entries at once, as Talon Karrde said.
Concerning the “multiple artist per album” problem, I have run into that also. In iTunes 7, if you go to the “show info” menu or whatever it’s called on Windows, there are two fields: artist and “artist for the album” or something like that (I am translating from the French so I don’t know the exact english field label.) In my case I had a 4-CD John Lennon collection. Sometimes the artist was John Lennon, sometimes John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, sometimes John Lennon and Yoko Ono, etc. I changed all the songs to say “album: Lennon” and “artist for album: John Lennon”, but I left the “artist” field alone. Also useful for compilation-style albums with each song by a different artist/band: make the “artist for album” field something like “Various Artists” for every song on the album.
I do it for viewing and sorting in iTunes, not for viewing on the iPod. For example when you’re flipping through the album art view the program will group albums better if the album and the “album artist” match for all entries on the same album. Or you can easily create an intelligent playlist saying “album artist = Dr Dre”.
Another feature I forgot that is handy for classical music albums when viewing in iTunes: for example I have an album that has Mendelssohn symphonies 4 and 5. The track titles are:
Symphony No. 4 - Movement I
Symphony No. 4 - Movement II
…
I can “group” all of the Symphony 4 movements together by putting the same “grouping” field for each one that says “Symphony No. 4”. Another feature useful for sorting and viewing in iTunes.
Exactly. I don’t use Itunes EVER on my PC except to load onto my Ipod. I don’t care how it looks on there. On my Ipod it still shows the track artists which is retarded.
I agree that the iPod needs more display options. In the meantime, you could create an intelligent playlist for the album artist of artists that present a special problem (Dr. Dre in your case seems to be an example) and view the songs by playlist, if your goal is to see all Dr. Dre songs in one group.
Eurgh, I think I would actually slay the designer of any program which mucked about with my tags unbidden.
Have you tried using EphPod to transfer your files across? On the rare occasions I’ve needed to transfer things on to (and off) an iPod I’ve found that far more intuitive and sane than iTunes. I think it does tagging, too, or you could use a third-party tagger (I use MP3Tag which is marvellous, but I don’t know what format you’re using…)