Singles, EPs, Albums... organising music better

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Level 1

45 points

Singles, EPs, Albums... organising music better

I'm interested in hearing how people manage their music collection when they have a lot of material by one artist. For example, for some of my favourite artists, I have a long list of items collected over the years from CD singles to EPs to full length albums to rare live stuff. When I glance at a list of material by an artist, it's pretty hard to pick out the important releases (i.e. the full retail albums) - they're kind of lost in a long list of stuff that I want to keep but don't listen to very often.

I am considering simply renaming the title of each "Album" (iTunes' word) so that the title would contain in brackets what the release is. For example:

Heart-Shaped Box (Single)
Nevermind (Album)
Oh, The Guilt (Single)
Paradiso (Live)
Tour Over Europe (Live) ... and so on (for 20 other Nirvana items)

But it's a lot of work so I want to make sure there's not a better alternative - I was wondering if anyone had come up with a better system for this? If you've a lot of material by an artist, what way do you do it?

Thanks!
Gavin

MacBook C2D 2Ghz, Mac OS X (10.5.1), 2GB RAM, 120GB HD

Posted on Jan 30, 2008 1:44 AM

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Answer 1

jere7my

Level 4

1,815 points

Jan 30, 2008 10:29 AM in response to Gavin Smith

If you don't care about release date, you could add false dates for the various categories (give singles a Date of 2101, EPs a Date of 2102, etc.), then sort Album by Year (click the Album column header until Album by Year appears). That will sort your music by Album Artist/Artist > Year > Album > Disc Number > Track Number, which would have the effect of grouping your singles and EPs together. (If you do care about release date, you could add 100 to the Date for singles, add 200 for EPs, etc.; then you'd still have the info available, as long as you didn't mind doing a little subtraction.) If iTunes had a Sort Year field, it would make all this easier.

Since I sometimes want to see albums only, but wanted to keep my Date fields accurate, I dragged all singles, EPs, and partial albums to a playlist called "Partials & Singles", then created an "Albums Only" smart playlist with the rule "Playlist is not Partials & Singles". When I want to see all my full albums, I can select the Albums playlist.

(My entire library I keep organized strictly chronologically, with singles mixed in with albums.)

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