"Groupings" feature in iTunes - Multiple Groupings?

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"Groupings" feature in iTunes - Multiple Groupings?

This seems to be one of those questions where it's hard to phrase the question in the right way to get relevant answers. (Or people just aren't wondering about this.) I would like to put multiple groupings on a single track. For example, if I have a track that's under the genre "Classical," I can go in and put "Baroque" in the groupings field. But can I then group Baroque tracks by "Vocal" vs "Instrumental"? Or "Chamber" vs "Orchestral"? Can a Miles Davis track be under the genre "Jazz" grouped "Post-Bop" and also "Ballad"? If you bring up tracks that are, say, "Baroque" and "Renaissance" and you want to further group them, and select all of them, the Groupings field will come up "Mixed" (Grayed out.) If I enter "Voca there, it will replace whatever was there (Baroque) with the new info (Vocal.) Has anyone dealt with this? It seems a valuable tool for a large music collection?

iMac 27", macOS 10.14

Posted on Apr 27, 2020 5:29 PM

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Answer 1

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ed2345

Level 9

62,492 points

Apr 27, 2020 6:34 PM in response to General Slocum

General,

The grouping field is just text, so you can put "Baroque Chamber 1600s" in the field if you want. But to achieve what you are trying, you may want to split the information across the Genre, Comments, and Grouping fields to your liking.

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Answer 2

ed2345

Level 9

62,492 points

Apr 29, 2020 3:05 PM in response to General Slocum

General,

Yeah I think this falls into the category of "it is what it is." I can't speak for Apple's design decisions, but clearly the more flexibility you allow in having multiple genres, groupings, etc., the more noise and complexity you add to display and sorting.

Sounds like you do have a workable system, but if you want to give some official feedback to Apple, use this link:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

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Answer 3

Apr 29, 2020 11:02 AM in response to ed2345

That's kind of what I figured. So selecting multiple items, if the grouping comes up "mixed", I can't tell what I'm erasing by entering new info. It's semi-functional, just a lot slower! : ) (I also use comments for things like personnel on a jazz record, for example. It starts getting dense keeping track of the system I'm using...) It seems that with the huge size of some audio files, it should be entirely doable to have more fields, or customizable ones.

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"Groupings" feature in iTunes - Multiple Groupings?

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