Just thought I'd share a little story about me and my love for organizing my iTunes music library. The whole time that I've been an iTunes user (coming up on 2 years now) I had issues with the way that iTunes handles multiple artists on the same song. For example, "Over and Over Again" by Tim McGraw and Nelly. iTunes only allows you one line for Artist, so do you put "Nelly & Tim McGraw", "Tim McGraw & Nelly", "Nelly ft. Tim McGraw", etc.? Lots of hip-hop music lately consists of a main artist with at least one guest artist taking a verse, so its been an issue I've faced many a time. I even sent an email to iTunes asking for multiple artist fields for each song, although I can see how that would open a whole different can of worms. Multiple genre assignments is another change I could see being useful.
Anyway, all this time, I've been putting Artist information as "Artist A ft. Artist B", and I've noticed that a lot of places (GraceNote, iTunes Music Store) were handling the "ft. Artist B" part in the Title of the Song, which really is not something that sat well with me. I mean, its not part of the name of the song. Its information about the Artist, right?
Well, even though its not right, I recently decided to give this alternate classification system a shot for a couple reasons. #1: All the different A ft. B's were taking up a lot of space in my list of Artist in my iPod. #2: Having A ft. B as the Artist meant that if you wanted to look for a specific artist just by their name, you could find them, but then when you want to their albums some tracks would be missing, because they were classified under A ft. B, rather than just A. (Anyone lost yet?) #3: The iPod display scrolls the Title information through the entire Title, but not through the entire Artist information. Thus, if you put the ft. B part in the Title, you can still see it scroll by eventually as you look at the iPod display. If you put the ft. B part in the Artist, all you ever see is "Artist A ft. .... " when the full Artist information is too long to fit on the screen all at once.
The main drawback that stands out to me (other than the obvious semantic blasphemy of putting Artist information in a Title field) is that now the featured Artist's names don't show up at all in the Artist field for those songs, which might make it harder to find a specific duet, and also makes creating Smart Playlists for specific artists a little clunkier, but still doable.
Anyway, I'm pleased to report that this new system has been a smashing success for me. I feel like my library is more concise and that its easier than ever to find what I want. Despite the drawbacks listed above, and having to deal with compromising the semantic integrity of my library, I've been very pleased with the way its turned out.
And anyone who is still reading at this point must be really bored or really nerdy.
2 comments:
By organize do you mean clean? Because I think its pretty organized. I rarely lose things in here.
P.S. If there were an accepted classifcation scheme (an ontology if you will) for items that go in a room, then I could probably improve things a bit. But as yet there is no industry standard, so I'm stuck with my own proprietary scheme.
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