To change the song titles on your iPod, first change the spellings in iTunes:
Highlight the song title.
Type Apple-I (or choose “Get Info” from the File menu).
In the window that opens, Click the “Info” button
Change the song title in the “Name” field.
Click the “OK” button in the lower right of the window.
Then plug your iPod into the computer and let it update.
Sorry that I don’t know an elegant way to get titles that begin with numbers or other characters to sort alphabetically. I’ll bet someone has written a shareware app that allows you to have a “display title” and a “sort title” for the same song.
You can also select several songs, right click and choose Get Info and change some information on all those tracks. For example, if you discover your collect has a bunch of songs credited to The Coors, you can select all the songs, go to Get Info and enter The Corrs in the correct place and they’ll all update with the correct spelling. You can also add cover art to them this way.
So where would Jethro Tull go in one’s lineup? When I first heard of Jethro Tull I thought this was the guy’s actual name, so I always classified it under T as “Tull, Jethro” in my listings until I learned otherwise. I haven’t really paid attention to where Jethro Tull is placed in most stores, though.
Also, what do you do about people like John Cougar Mellancamp who can’t seem to make up their mind on what to call themselves? Does he go under “C” for Cougar, or “M” for Mellancamp?
I would also say the same for Jefferson Starship/Airplane, but by the time they released the abomination of “We Built This City” they bore no resemblance at all to their original sound in the 60’s and might as well have been a separate band, so they could be classified separately under “Starship” as far as I’m concerned.
Mellencamp made up his mind more than twenty years ago. The “John Cougar” name was not his decision, and as soon as he could, he went back to his real name, John Mellencamp. “John Cougar Mellencamp” was a brief interim name to guide record buyers from one to the other.
That’s an easy one, it should go under J. However as recently as a few years ago I noticed bins for Tull under both J and T at my local Tower Records.
Alice Cooper (the '70s band) is a little harder, as it was the name of the band, but also the stage name of the frontman, who was pretty much perceived by the public as a solo artist all along. Cooper’s long solo career has pretty much solved the dilemma, as it would be silly to file the Alice Cooper band albums and the post-Welcome to My Nightmare solo stuff separately, so C it is.
Ah, but not everywhere. My local CD shop has him under “A”. Someone on the staff also puts him under “C” once in a while, but it’s mostly “A”. Matter of fact, there’s a copy of "Billion Dollar Babies’ in the “A” section right now.