Why doesn't Itunes/Ipod ...

Factual Questions
1

  1. Let me do a global search and replace of data in individual song entries? For example, if I want to change all references to “E. Y. Harburg” to “Yip Harburg,” I currently have to find a way to go through thousands of songs to find them and change them one at a time. It’s even worse if Harburg is just one of multiple composers of a particular track.

  2. Let me compile statistics, such as how many songs were composed or co-composed by Yip Harburg, how many albums include compositions by him, and what proportion of total entries does that constitute?

  3. Display on the Ipod, all the song data I’ve entered into Itunes? When I’m playing a track on my Pod, why can’t I see the year, composer, etc.?

  4. Properly manage “Album Artist” data? Smoetimes it decides on its own that the album artist is “Various Artists” even though I’ve entered something else. For example the “Very Best of Elvis Costello” includes tracks credited to “Elvis Costello and the Attractions” as well as to “Elvis Costello.” I have put “Elvis Costello” for the Album Artist, but in the album listing of my Pod, it credits the whole album to “Various Artists.”

  5. Allow me to use the full Ipod screen for track data and relegate the image (if there is one) to a clickable screen (like rating)?

  6. Stop sticking in a stupid, useless “default” image?

  7. Scroll the artist and album name instead of just the track title?

  8. Understand that a single album name (Greatest Hits) might apply to more than one album?

… more to come …

2

I don’t know all the answers to your questions, but here’s the ones I do know:

I can’t help you with the multiple-composer thing, but here’s a couple of things to keep in mind when you’re doing this. First, typing things into the search box in the top right corner only searches the fields available in the current view. If I type “Scythian” into the search box while I’m looking at the entire Music Library, it returns no results; if I type it in when I’m looking at my “Classical” playlist, it returns the four movements of Prokofiev’s “Scythian Suite”. The reason is that the only place this word appears is in the “Grouping” field, which under my current preferences is displayed when I’m viewing the “Classical” playlist but not in the Library view.

Second, you can do a batch replace by selecting multiple tracks and selecting “Get Info” under the file menu. This’ll open up a window that allows you to change the tags for all the songs you’ve selected.

iTunes isn’t really supposed to be full-featured database software. However, all the library information is kept in an XML file, which you could import into a piece of software that’s better-suited to making such queries if you’re really curious. On my system (Mac OSX), the file is called “iTunes Music Library.xml” and is located in Music > iTunes.

As far as I know, these are all hard-wired in. You’d have to ask the software developers to get the answer to the literal question (“Why?”) that you’re asking.

I’ve never had a problem with this, myself, but then I’m not sure that I own any albums with duplicate names. Is this a problem when you’re going through the Artists menu on your iPod? In other words, if you select Music > Artist A > Greatest Hits on your iPod, do you also get the tracks from the “Greatest Hits” album of Artist B?

3
  1. Why doesn’t Itunes “remember” my view options for CDs? Every time I insert a new CD, it goes back to the default view options.

Thanks for the suggestions, MikeS

It’s a problem when I’m going through the Albums menu. It combined all the albums titled “Greatest Hits” into one album (with artist “Various Artists”). I had to rename them “Greatest Hits (Bruce Springsteen),” “Greatest Hits (James Taylor),” etc.

Nothing on No. 4?

4
  1. Why can’t I enter “sort” information in the CD view?

Does anyone know if there is any route for conveying these complaints directly to Apple? Do they have a customer suggestion procedure or anything?

5

Yep

6

Thanks, Dave!

7

Okay here’s some more questions –

  1. I see a category called “release date” but I can’t figure out how to enter that data.

  2. Is there any way I can sort albums by artist/year instead of artist/album title?

8

Be very careful “suggesting” stuff about iTunes or iPods. Last year a 9yo kid emailed Apple some ideas along those lines. Given the fraught relationship of late between digital music providers and consumers, Apple decided the wisest course of action was to have in-house counsel send the kid a cease and desist letter.

9

Heh.

First of all, I wouldn’t go hide in my room if I got a cease-and-desist letter.
Second of all, I wouldn’t give any real ideas to Apple for free anyway.

10

Do you have the “part of a compilation” box checked for each song on each “Greatest Hits” album? If you do, try unchecking it.

11

I’m reviving this thread because I’ve figured out at least one of the problems, namely:

The reason it does this is that Apple apparently doesn’t know what the word “compilation” means. A compilation is an album that is made up of tracks that were originally released separately.

For example:

(1) A “greatest hits” album is a compilation
(2) Many movie soundtracks are compilations

Apparently, Apple thinks a compilation is any album to which more than one recording artist has contributed tracks. Idiots.

Furthermore, when you mark an album as a “compilation” and it does have some tracks with differing artists, it displays in the Ipod as a “various artists” album.

Damn it. Yes, Decade has a few tracks by Buffalo Springfield and C.S.N.Y., but it’s still a “Neil Young” album, not a “various artists” album. That’s why I specified “Neil Young” in the “album artist” field.

12

Yes. Keep clicking on the “Album” column header until it says “Album by year”. Your list will then be sorted by artist name, and within each artist the albums will be sorted by year, rather than by title.

13

I guess I’m an idiot too, then, because I don’t see how your definition of compilation could be at all useful in iTunes. Why on Earth would it possibly be useful to distinguish an artist’s greatest hits album from any of their other albums? Whereas being able to treat “The greatest hits of the 60’s” differently than “The Eagle’s Greatest Hits” is very useful.

14

Then you’ll have to explain that to me.

As it is, the “compilation” issue is screwing up my sorting.

(1) If I turn on “compilation,” then it relabels, for example, “Decade - Neil Young” as “Decade - Various Artists” and in “artist” view, it doesn’t list “Buffalo Springfield” and “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young” separately.

(2) If I turn off “compilation,” then it treats “Decade” as at least three separate albums in “cover flow” view.

Frankly, I can’t win.

15

  1. In the “Info” window, why isn’t there a space for “Show” (not the same as “Album”)? I have to type in the show name for every track.

  2. Why can’t I sort for “Composer,” then “Name”? The way it is now, I have to add the composer’s name at the beginning of each track.

  3. Why isn’t there an “Undo”?

16

Do I take it, then that “Decade” actually lists “Neil Young” as the artist on some songs, and “Buffalo Springfield” as the artist on other songs? Personally, what I do in such a situation is go in and change the sort artist on all songs on Decade to just “Neil Young”, and not set it as a compilation. So then you’ll see it as a single album in cover flow (and when sorted by artist).

From your #1 and #2 here, I’m not quite sure what it is that you’d like to see. Here’s a page I found with a good explanation of how the iTunes compilation feature works, maybe it will help: How compilations work (scroll down about a page to “And now, for this week’s Ask iLounge column”). The paragraph with and following “if all of the tracks by a given artist are flagged as “Part of a Compilation” that artist’s name will be omitted from the list of artists” might especially apply to what you’re seeing with “Decade”.

17

Yes, on Decade (which is a greatest hits-type compilation album), most of the songs are credited to Neil Young, but a few are credited to Buffalo Springfield or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. However, it is still a “Neil Young” album and not a “various artists” album.

But if I do that, then “Buffalo Springfield” will not appear in the right place in “artist” view.

I guess in a general sense, what I would really like is for the Ipod to stop trying to outsmart me and just take my entries as I enter them in all the fields (I use all the “sort” fields).

Specifically, this is what I want:

(1) In “cover flow” view, I want one entry for each “album” (sorted by “sort album”)labeled by “album” and “album artist.” The problem here is that instead of merely looking at my “album artist” entry, the Ipod goes in and looks at the list of all the entries for “artist” and decides that if some tracks are credited to one artist and other tracks are credited to another artist, then the label should read “various artists.”

(2) In “artist” view, I want an entry for every single discrete name that appears in artist fields, regardless of how they are put together on albums. The problem here is that if something is labeled as a “compilation,” then it disregards the various artists on a single compilation album.

(3) In “album” view, I want it like “cover flow” – one entry for each album (sorted by “sort album” and labeled by “album” and “album artist.”

Just FYI, and I have a very special system for “sort album”–for example:

album=“Abbey Road” // sort album=“Beatles 1969b”
album=“Spinal Tap Soundtrack” // sort album=“Soundtrack Spinal Tap”
album=“Disco Gold” // sort album=“Various Artists Disco Gold”

Thank you. This is a very helpful link. Having read it, I have decided to follow its instructions to shut off the compilations functionality.

The Ipod still thinks that Decade is a “various artists” album, though.