How to Keep Full Albums Separate from Random Singles
Hi everyone. I've been trying to find a way to keep my full albums with other full albums, separate from one-song singles I've downloaded, for easier browsing on both the iPod and iTunes. I found a working (but less than optimal) solution, which I wrote about on my blog. I thought it might be of interest to people here, so here it is:
How to Keep Full Albums Separate from Random Singles (http://phronko.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-keep-full-albums-separate-from.html)
If anyone's found a better way to organize their music in the way I propose, I'd love to hear it. I do wish there was a way to just browse a playlist by Artist instead of by Song Title, which would solve a lot of problems.
[734 byte] By [
phronk] at [2007-11-11 17:02:22]
# 1 Re: How to Keep Full Albums Separate from Random Singles
There is also a "group compilations while browsing" option in iTunes preferences that mimics the iPod situation while browsing. Not sure how it reacts during coverflow working. Of course all my compilations have album artist=various artist, so they get shot to the end of the list anyway in coverflow.
Changing the album artist to "various artists" might be a better thing to force singles to the end of the general music list, but still no great way of doing it.
I simply mark all songs in a full album with "complete" in the comments and make a smartplaylist and browse that in iTunes. Of course I browse play with my iPod completely differently than in iTunes.
Please judicious in posting too many links to your external blog. We understand you are just trying to be helpful, and likely mean no disrespect, but we have a policy on drawing the general iLounge membership to personal sites.
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Cheers,
Stu
# 2 Re: How to Keep Full Albums Separate from Random Singles
Sorry about that. I did just mean to share the information, not promote my blog or anything, and figured it would be quicker to post a link rather than cutting and pasting the long article. I guess having that link, combined with the link in my signature, was a little obnoxious though.
Anyway, yeah I did forget to mention that "group compilations while browsing" should be checked as well. I thought of using the Album Artist tag, but I don't think it would make much of a difference the way I have it (and I assume the artists would still come up when browsing the iPod, unless the compilation trick is also done). Compilations are all banished to the bottom of the list anyway.
One nice thing is that coverflow is smart enough to recognize a compilation with various artists, and labels it as such. So when I look through coverflow, there is one album called "Singles", by "Various Artists", with a few thousand songs in it.
I'm still trying to figure out how iTunes orders songs within this album though. They seem completely random to me. It also seems to randomly pick some album art to display in cover flow. Very strange. I don't suppose anyone has insight into how iTunes orders songs when the selected order is held constant? (i.e. it's set to order by album...which causes tracks within each album to be ordered by track number...but what if both album and track number are the same for multiple tracks?)
phronk at 2007-11-15 16:12:38 >
# 3 Re: How to Keep Full Albums Separate from Random Singles
I created five playlists: full albums, mixtapes, singles, partial albums, and unreleased. All of my unreleased (various remixes, demos, instrumentals, etc.) has the album as "Unreleased", so I just put "Unreleased" in the grouping field of all of those albums.
With these five playlists in easy view, I arranged my library by "albums", then switched to Coverflow mode. I dragged each album art to it's appropriate playlist. With all my songs in the correct playlist, I then tagged each playlist's tracks with the correct information in the grouping field: all full albums in the full album's playlist were tagged with "full albums" and so forth. I was surprised at how little time it took me to do something I thought would take forever.
Now, I always tag new tracks I add with the appropriate info in the grouping field, and I have five smartlists: Full Albums, Mixtapes, Singles, Partial Albums and Unreleased, all auto-updated as I add music to my library.
# 4 Re: How to Keep Full Albums Separate from Random Singles
That's a great solution for iTunes, since there are sorting options within each playlist. But how do you browse albums within each playlist on your iPod? From what I understand, when you go to your Full Albums smart playlist, you will only see a long list of songs, not artists or albums, which makes it hard to find a specific album, and even harder to casually browse through.
phronk at 2007-11-15 16:14:44 >
# 5 Re: How to Keep Full Albums Separate from Random Singles
Having set a bunch of tracks to the album "single" and to have those songs having multiple different track numbers, I.e. some will be 1 of 7 while other's will be 1 of 15 or something like that, will cause some indiscriminate sorting of the album.
I have found some interesting things when it comes to album sorting and no real way of understanding what it means. All i know is that if you sort by album, the first sorting criteria for this is NOT the track number, because I have an album that will be out of track order if I sort by album, but if I sort by album by year or album by artist, it will be in the correct album order. This is even though I have album artist, track number, album, etc all with pristine tags. There is just something weird about it.
Look for some trends in this album, it may sort end up sorting all track ones, all track twos all track threes. If some songs have a disk tag number while others don't, these will be grouped together ahead of track order. i.e. all songs tagged disk 1 of 1 will be grouped together, then disks 2 of 2 with probably blank ones being first, then they will go into track order. Erasing track tags from all of these songs should potentially force some kind of alphabetical sort. of the album. Since you've already destroyed the album, track numbers probalby aren't needed anymore either. It could potentially bring some order to the sort.
When it comes to my playlists of complete albums/singles, I don't tend to not browse these from an iPod standpoint. I either shuffle songs and play my single playlist or set it to "shuffle albums" and play my complete album playlist. That being said most of my iPod listening is made from specific playlists of songs in a specific order/shuffle, I don't tend to browse whole lists on my iPod (mostly because of lack of filtering). If I have specific albums I want quick access too I make a playlist for easy access. I mostly play a scattered playlists of my five star songs, or a random 79 minute playlist pulled from all songs. I listen on my iPod much differently than I do on my iTunes.
If I want an album in particular I simply browse albums directly and not mind having to browse through a few extras in the list to find the exact album, or I know what artist I want to listen two and go artist->album, and ignore extra albums with "singles" in them.
So part of the issue also expounds on personal preferences and personal levels of annoyance with the sorting, order and organization of the iPod.
Not sure if the new sort commands would be helpful in the endeavors of sorting out singles from complete albums.
What I would like to see is a simple flag that could count albums as complete or not.
I personally don't want to strip my "singles" from their album name either, because songs I have purchased from full albums, etc, may be different that ones marketed as direct singles, for instance I want to distinquish the John Mayer song "Your Body is a wonderland" versions from the one that's on Room for Squares, from the one on "inside wants out" from the one on the disk single for "Your Body is a wonderland".
But I'm a completest even if not all my albums are complete ;)
Cheers, You can ignore most of my inane thoughts if you'd like. No harm done on the link, just pointing you to the policy. I was sure your intentions were harmless, just pointing you towards keeping in in check :D
Stu
# 6 Re: How to Keep Full Albums Separate from Random Singles
That's a great solution for iTunes, since there are sorting options within each playlist. But how do you browse albums within each playlist on your iPod? From what I understand, when you go to your Full Albums smart playlist, you will only see a long list of songs, not artists or albums, which makes it hard to find a specific album, and even harder to casually browse through.
To answer your question, there really is no other option other than to ask yourself "Do I want this list of songs sorted by album, album by artist, etc.", then use that arrangement in iTunes, which will then arrange your playlist that way on your iPod. This is simply one of the few (at least in my opinion) flaws in the UI of the iPod. However, this is something that coverflow mode or some other similar browse by album-art mode on future iPods could solve. That's one aspect of the iPhone (and if any similar technology finds it way onto it, the 6g iPod) that sounds neat: to be in a playlist and to just turn rotate the unit and be able to browse my playlists in a visual format.
But yeah, the only thing you can do is decide in what type of alphabetical order you can best remember or sort through. It's either that or creating individual playlists of all of your full albums (dragging coverflow or album-art view onto the left-panel of itunes will auto-create a playlist for that album - even name it for you). Then, you could list your "regular" playlists as A: Hit Mix A: Five Stars so that they would appear first in your list of playists on your iPod.
You'll end up with a gaggle of playlists, but with the right naming scheme (which I just exampled) you can keep them fairly organized, and further organized in iTunes with the help of folders. Naturally, this brings up the very solid point that a folder system on the iPod itself would help a ton too: it seems like something that could easily be done with an update anyways.
