What is Grouping? and its benefits?

Grouping is used to group together related songs. For example, movements within classical works, or songs on albums that are intended to be listened to together. Jackson Brown's "The Loadout" and "Stay" is an example of two songs that you almost never hear apart from one another.

iTunes 5.0 has a new feature: shuffle by grouping. When activated, it causes tracks with the same grouping to stay together when being shuffled.

Another use for the grouping feature has to do with smart playlists. I too have a bunch of songs I call one hit wonders. I have put one hit wonders in the group field and now I can create a smart playlists for all of my one hit wonder! but the true beauty of it is that I can keep the original genre (rock, pop, country, etc.) and put multiple "group" names in the grouping field. for example, I might want to put a certain song in the one hit wonders playlist, but also have it come up on a mix I create to listen to in my car, but I want it to stay in the rock genre. in the grouping field, I will put "one hit wonders, car list #1" and create 2 separate smart playlists to find each of these songs. sure, I could just drag this song to normal playlists and accomplish the same thing, but it is a lot easier to manage my iTunes library with meta data (id3 tags) and smart playlists.

have fun with it and explore. I'm sure there are other ways you could use it!

Can a person also use the genre classification and maybe create a new class to help segregate particular songs?

You can put multiple genres in the genre field separated by commas such as "country, bluegrass". Actually, iTunes doesn't need the commas, but they make it easier for humans to read.

Then, in a smart playlist you would separate them out with a condition such as "Genre contains country". The important thing to point out here is that the condition is using "contains" and not "is".

One downside of this approach is that when you sort on Genre, anything labled "country, bluegrass" will appear after everything labled "country".

I do this in the comments field so I don't muck up the genres. I put things like genre=Classical; or mood=Quiet; in the comments field and then smart playlist off that.

just curious about this grouping stuff.

In response to toonz' message:
Can a person also use the genre classification and maybe create a new class to help segregate particular songs?

I wonder what then is this new (?) "category" thing.

I faintly remember having seen music somewhere in the iTMS which was kind of "grouped" and which "group" I could expand via the well-known triangle and then see the grouped pieces. Yes, I think it was classical music. (And no, it wasn't an album in my shopping cart, and I wasn't drunk, as far as I can remember ;-))

I'd be overly glad if someone could provide a tip how to accomplish this with my own library of classical music.

TIA, Tom

Classical works purchased on the iTunes Music Store will have the turn-down triangle to "group" the movements in the work together within the store display. You often also have the chance to buy the entire work (rather than just a movement, or the entire album). This may be where you saw this UI. iTunes does not currently provide a UI such as this within the iTunes display.

When such works are purchased, the Grouping field will have been filled in with the title of the work.

Because Grouping has real meaning inside of iTunes (ie, it can now control shuffle behavior) I recommend against using it as a random additional field for storage of your own data. If you need this, you might considering using the comments field instead.

All you're doing there is creating a new genre on the list called "country, bluegrass".

I wasn't claiming that I was doing anything different, and the fact that it is neither country or bluegrass is a problem. But it is one way of making it so you can use smart playlists to sort things out. Personally, I don't use this trick, but I know people who do.

How well does Grouping work? The iTunes Help says that if Groupings is selected in Playback preferences, it will play the tracks in the order they appear on the album.

If this works as advertised, I will re-import some of the classical CDs in my collection. Having things like the Nutcracker Suite play in the correct order, while still keeping the dozen or so movements as separate tracks will be very useful. If this function does what is says it will do. Does it?

You can put multiple genres in the genre field separated by commas such as "country, bluegrass". Actually, iTunes doesn't need the commas, but they make it easier for humans to read.

All you're doing there is creating a new genre on the list called "country, bluegrass". iTunes doesn't associate it with either country or bluegrass, and your genre list now has an undesirable entry for "country, bluegrass" (and the music so tagged will not appear under either country or bluegrass).

Multiple genres per song has been my greatest iTunes wish for years. It's really annoying not having that.