What's the best way to manage MP3 labels for Greatest Hits albums?

The MP3 labels tell the player how to organize the indexes. There’s a artist tag, album tag, Genre, and a bunch more.

Compilation Sets (Greatest Hits) are a challenge. I really don’t want a hundred names of One Hit Wonders cluttering up my Artists list. Scrolling through 300 names isn’t fun on a tiny Mp3 chiclet arrow pad. Those Time Life compilations have a lot of songs on them. I just bought a new SanDisk Sansa Clip player just for my Time Life sets.

I’m curious to hear what strategies other people use?

I have thought about changing the Artist Tag to the album tag. That way I’d only get one entry in the Artist list. But, I hate to wipe out that information. It only takes seconds to replace all the artist tags with something else. To type that back in would take hours. :dubious:

What are you doing? How are you handling it?

I find the Time Life Sets are the best for my player when I’m traveling. It’s a nice mix of different songs in a single genre.

This isn’t really a music question per se, so moved to IMHO (from Cafe Society).

It depends upon how you search.

If you can select different tag sorts then I find that using the compilation album name is fine when I want to listen to a particular album or CD, and when I want an artist search then that works fine too.

It also depends partly upon how your player recognises the tracks, some use the filenames, whilst others use the tags, and on some you can choose either. If it goes by filenames, then its usually better to go by artist/song title.

I would look at a particular artist and assign the same genre to all that person’s material - I know that’s not really the correct way but it works well if you have a randomise feature since it should bring up all of those artists you have put into that genre - it works well enough.Different CD rips seem to place the same artist into different genres, you can also get the very same song from different albums put into different genres just because of the way the Album compiler decided to tag the tracks before sending them on to the CDDB, so I find its not a bad idea to set the genre myself for each artist.

You idea of changing the Artist tag to the album tag should be unnecessary, in fact it will reduce your choice of search options. Most MP3 players will assign compilations to their own group, which still allows you to search for artists.

If your player has severe limitations in the display or search systems, you would be well advised to use lots of playlists.

The most important thing really is to ensure your tags are absolutely consistent, or you end up with the same artist being listed in several separate lines in the search - and all because you used slightly different spacing, or maybe slightly different use of an apostrophe - it can be irksome to find multiple entries for the same artist - and one thing I have not yet got worked out is when you have one artist with lots of different names - or partners or collaborators.

I’ll have to see how the SanDisk Sansa Clip player handles tags.

I’ve used Creative Labs in the past. My first was the super simple Stone. It has no menu system at all. It used filenames for the play order. I had to do things like Al1_S01_songname Al1_S02_songname, (for the next album) Al2,S01_Songname to ensure it played the songs in the correct order. The Stone did recognize folders. There was a slide switch to change from one folder to another.

Then I got a fancier one with a menu system. Under the menus I see Artists, Albums, Genre. If I click Artist, then I see every Artist on the player. Album lists all my album titles. I quickly learned it was the Mp3 tags that made this magic work.

I’ll get the SanDisk Sansa Clip out of the shrink wrap and see how it works.

Anyone know if the SanDisk Sansa Clip player will use a cover.jpg file if I put it in the sub folder?

I could make the album cover a tag with the mp3. that’s what worked on my Creative Labs player. It would be so much simpler if the player would just use a .jpg in the subfolder.

I don’t understand the problem. Why would you be going to the Artist list in the first place if you didn’t want to search for a particular Artist, or to see what artists you had songs by?

Nitpick: I would say that “Compilation” = a bunch of artists; “Greatest Hits” = one artist with songs from multiple albums.

Album Artist = always put “Various Artists”. If you auto-acquire the artwork, then this will make it work. You can check the “Compliation” box. That seems to remove the artist from the “Artists” list though, but keeps it on “Albums.” As I rarely use the latter, it’s not much use for me. The “Grouping” tab I’ve had mixed success with. These might be iTunes/iPod-specific?

I might put the artist name in the song after the title. So album might be “Crappiest Hits of the 80’s” and full title would be “We Built this City - Jefferson Starship.” It depends on how much space you have to display, though.

There are maybe a couple dozen artists that I purchased all their albums. Like CCR. or Bread. It’s nice to see all my Bread albums under that Artist. or all my CCR albums.

itunes must be a little different than the players I’ve been using. I have a 4 layer menu system. one of the layers is artist, albums, genre. There isn’t a search. If you click Artist then you get a list of every artist on the mp3 player. you have to arrow down through it.

Apparently the SanDisk Sansa Clip doesn’t display the cover art. I used Mp3 tag to add it to all my songs. Songs are playing but no cover display. I know they got added because Explorer shows the cover when I click on a song.

oh well. cover art works great on the Creative Labs player.

talking with my wife. She suggested putting all the Time Life compilations on one Mp3 player. Then it wouldn’t matter if the Artist list was a mile long. I could just look under Albums. There shouldn’t be all that many albums. One Time Life Album set might have 200 songs. That will fill up a player pretty quick.

These players are so cheap there’s really no reason to put everything on one player.

I like these suggestions. ** various artists** for the artist tag and Song_Name_Artist to identify the song. The song name scrolls on the player so it really doesn’t care how long it is. Whatever the Windows filename limit is.

Leaving_On_A_Jet_Plane_John_Denver.mp3 would work for a compilation cd

I don’t understand what the issue is. I tag my mp3s artist, album, title. If I’m in the mood for some Soul music from my youth, I search artist for “Four Tops” and start it up. If I’m in the mood for just music from my youth, I search album for “Billboard’s Greatest Hits of 1969.”