Solved How to catagorize singles?

[Lava King]

Hi all,

I've spent no small amount of time "fixing" the tags in my music collection so that all the albums show correctly in Media Player.

I'm stuck at what to do with all the singles. They show up now as "unknown album" and it rather spoils the aesthetics of the whole deal. I've tried using "single" as an album title but Media Player still shows it as Unknown Album.

Call it obsessive/compulsive, but is there anything I can do to "prettify" my Media Player listing?

Kent

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Why not just ignore (delete) all tags except artist and song title for the songs in question?? Then just categorize them in alphabetical order by artist.

 

[Lava King]

Why not just ignore (delete) all tags except artist and song title for the songs in question?? Then just categorize them in alphabetical order by artist.

Thanks, I appreciate the input. I tried that, and they still aren't the way I want them. So, I'm going to go with "x" as the album name, then all the singles will be grouped together. Since no other albums begin with x, at least they'll be in a catagory by themselves. When I tried "singles" as an album name, they were mixed in with all the albums beginning with s. That offended my sense of order.

Kent

 

[ignatzatsonic]

All of my mp3s are individual songs, not albums. The files are all named in this format:

artist name space hyphen space song title

Such as Elvis Presley - Heartbreak Hotel

However, I noticed that on rare occasions, some of them would not sort properly in Itunes, even though they did sort properly (alphabetically by artist) in Windows Explorer.

Investigation showed that these particular songs had an "album artist" tag that differed from the "artist" tag and that iTunes was in these cases sorting by the "album artist" tag rather than by the desired "artist" tag. Why, I don't know. I'm guessing that iTunes is hard-coded to sort first by "album artist" tag, if it exists.

The solution was to delete the "album artist" tag, forcing iTunes to sort on the "artist" tag.

I'd guess that in your case, any weird sorting in your player is the result of tag oddities of one kind or another.

 

[Lava King]

All of my mp3s are individual songs, not albums. The files are all named in this format:

artist name space hyphen space song title

Such as Elvis Presley - Heartbreak Hotel

However, I noticed that on rare occasions, some of them would not sort properly in Itunes, even though they did sort properly (alphabetically by artist) in Windows Explorer.

Investigation showed that these particular songs had an "album artist" tag that differed from the "artist" tag and that iTunes was in these cases sorting by the "album artist" tag rather than by the desired "artist" tag. Why, I don't know. I'm guessing that iTunes is hard-coded to sort first by "album artist" tag, if it exists.

The solution was to delete the "album artist" tag, forcing iTunes to sort on the "artist" tag.

I'd guess that in your case, any weird sorting in your player is the result of tag oddities of one kind or another.

I use exactly the same format for my single mp3s. For albums, the track number is added to the beginning so that they'll show in the right order. It goes without saying that the albums are in their own folders and the singles are semi-categorized into folders such as classical, seventies, eighties, folk-rock, rap, and so on (I have rather eclectic tastes).

What I want, and wasn't communicating clearly, is for the singles to be grouped together and not interspersed with the albums.

Way back in the distant past I used Winamp for playing mp3s, but then for reasons I don't recall just started using WMP. Didn't really listen to albums all at once, I'd just use Windows Explorer to navigate to the appropriate folder and double-click the song I wanted to hear.

Now, since my music collection has grown so much, It will be much easier if the whole collection is presented at once for single or album selection.

I did run into the mismatching artist/contributing artist tag thing, I was getting several albums shown twice (or more) with the songs split between the entries. I experimented until I found the offending tag entry.

Another stumbling block was that I was unaware of the different tag versions. My media collection is stored on a linux (Ubuntu 10.04) machine. I acquired EasyTAG and spent hours editing tags. When I was done, there were still anomalies when accessed by WMP. Then found out that EasyTAG saves as v2.4 and WMP wants v2.3.

So, put ID3-TagIT on my Windows 7 machine as it allows you to view v1 and v2 tags. It will also convert between the various versions.

Slowly but surely, I'm getting my music collection to where I want, just wish that I didn't have to keep redoing the same things over and over.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I'm not sure there is any way to solve your problem other than what you have done.

My situation is simplified to a degree by the fact that I don't have any "albums". All I have is individual songs, separated into 10 genres (rock and roll, blues, country, etc) and then by artist within each genre. I couldn't play an "album" if I wanted to.

I use iTunes and have a playlist structure within it that is a mirror image of my Windows Explorer folder structure, so I have 10 playlists in iTunes--one for each of my genre folders.

I can play randomly from within any playlist or from the entire library, or in alpha order in any playlist or the entire library. But I can't play albums as I don't have any. In my younger days, I was obsessed with details such as album art, source LP, etc, but have ultimately decided all I need to know is the artist and song title.

I use mp3tag to edit tags. I just force the artist and title tags to correspond to the file name. It's fine with me if all other tags are 100% wrong as I never refer to them or care about them.