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Multiple Artists and Genres per Song

I listen to lots of electronic music, and I'm a professional DJ.


Electronic music is a very diverse and complex music category, and have lots of genres and sub-genres. Electronic music producers usually try to transpose genre boundaries, and they usually produce songs contained in two or more equally important genres. For instance, a track can be contained in the genres "house" and "techno", or "disco", "techno" and "acid".


Also, it's really very common that electronic music artists collaborate with each other. Songs produced in collaboration do not belong to one single artist, but to two or more. In this case, it's not correct to say that one is the main artist, and the others are second artists (collaborators, composers remixes, or whatever) - they all detain the same equal authorship status over the composed track.


The problem with iTunes is that it supports one single genre, and one single artist per song. Sure, there's the album artist, but, again, that doesn't apply to albums where multiple artists participate with equal importance. And using "V.A." or "Various Artists" in the song artist or album artist fields is ugly and useless - it doesn't say anything relevant.


I know that Smart Playlists and Grouping features can help alleviate this deficiency, but they don't solve them at all. They're not elegant and complete solutions. If you browse the iTunes library, you will still see tracks as having only one genre and one artist, which is very frustrating.


What I ask is really easy to implement. In fact, it wouldn't require to alter the existing ID3 and tag scheme. Just split artists and genres using a colon or semicolon character. For instance, in the "Artist" tag, iTunes can store the following:


"Christian Smith; Mark Broom; Renato Cohen"


and then, in the browser, iTunes could display "Christian Smith", "Mark Broom" and "Renato Cohen" as three distinct artists.


The same could be used for the "Genre" tag:


"Techno; House; Progressive"


could be see, in the browser, as three different genres: "Techno", "House" and "Progressive".


I've made an extensive web research, and I know that this deficiency doesn't annoy only me, but lots of other users. And it's a pretty old request too - dated from 2003.


Please, Apple, implement this feature. My huge electronic music collection really needs to be categorized into multiple artists and multiple genres.


Thank you.

Posted on May 31, 2011 7:51 PM

Reply
73 replies

Jul 1, 2017 4:46 PM in response to neyuru



Changing Itunes to associate to each artist X, Y and Z one song (independent of the "album artist" metadata) is, I assume, not a titanic endeavour. It is also not as simple as treating the semicolon like an "OR" but it can be managed like this. Why oh why does Apple does not implement this?

Not sure what you mean by "associate." If a track has artist "X;Y;Z" and you sort the list by Artist, do you want the track to appear 3 times?


Anyway, if you want to make a suggestion to Apple, you can use this link:

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

Jul 1, 2017 5:19 PM in response to ed2345

Not sure what you mean by "associate."

If you choose to sort your library by artist, then this song should appear listed under each one of those artists, like so:


Artist A

-

-...

Artist X

-

song1

-


Artist Y

-

song1

-


Artist Z

-

song1

-

do you want the track to appear 3 times?

of course not -simultaneoulsy-, only you sort your library by "Artists" (other options being "recents", "albums", "songs", etc.) so that Itunes displays song1 if one selects either artist X, Y or Z.


Anyway, if you want to make a suggestion to Apple, you can use this link:

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

I already did, but there is a limit in the ammount of text you can place in the suggestion.

Jul 1, 2017 3:11 PM in response to felipead

Although I do not know for how long, Itunes is close to behaving as expected. The "Artists" field in Itunes (and in many other media players, if not all) filters the "Album Artist" in your collection, not the song "Artist" metadata of the songs. If no "Album Artist" is present in the song's metadata, then Itunes correctly assigns the song to an artist, if and only if there is only one artist in the song's "Artist" metadata.


For example, let's say you have ripped a CD (-album1-) that is a compilation of "Various Artists", with one of the songs -song1- being a collaboration between two artists: artist X and Y. The song "Artist" metadata in -song1- can then be "X; Y" and the "Album Artist" is "Various Artists". Let's suppose you have another song: -song2- of the same artist X (of another album -album2-) so that the metadata of this second song is "X" for both the song "Artist" and the "Album Artist" metadata.


Naturally, the album ripped from the CD would be shown in the "Various Artists" category of Itunes. If you manually erase the metadata field "Album Artist" in this album, then it will not longer be viewed in the "Various Artists" category but rather on the "Compilations" category. In each of these two cases, only -song2- of -album2- would show up as a song pertaining to artist X in the "Artists" field in Itunes.


If you then manually change the "Artist" (yes, "Artist", not "Album Artist") metadata in -song1- to show only artist X (e.g. by erasing artist Y), then artist X would have associated with it two songs: -song1- and -song2-. This is the desired behaviour. The converse is also true: if you erase artist X from the metadata of -song1-, leaving only artist Y, then this song would show up in the artist's Y list of songs.


As you can see, the problem is that if the song has more than one artist in the "artist" metadata of the song, e.g. "X; Y; Z" then Itunes DOES NOT associate this song with either artist. Instead it either:
1) uses the information on the "Album Artist" metadata or
2) if not present, it shows in the "compilations" category.


Changing Itunes to associate to each artist X, Y and Z one song (independent of the "album artist" metadata) is, I assume, not a titanic endeavour. It is also not as simple as treating the semicolon like an "OR" but it can be managed like this. Why oh why does Apple does not implement this?

Jun 1, 2011 3:58 PM in response to felipead

Felipead, As you know, iTunes is not designed for a "professional DJ." It is consumer-grade freeware.


iTunes only allows one genre, but you can make it as complicated as you like, depending on what information you wish to include. I have genres in my library that look like "Funky/vocal/disco/club house," "Uplifting/progressive trance," and "Shoegaze/noise pop/pop/rock," and of course they will match on any of the words.


The multiple artists thing is a problem, and is in fact a subset of a bigger problem. Hip-hop fans would like the featured artist, classical fans would like the conductor, orchestra, and soloists, and so on. I cannot speculate why iTunes has not done more about this. But I would observe that iTunes is optimized for syncing iPods, most of which are real-estate limited to only display 3 fields (Artist, Title, Album) no matter how complicated you make the metadata for the tracks.


If you'd like to take one more kick at the can of feedback to Apple, you can do so here.


Ed

Jun 1, 2011 4:22 PM in response to ed2345

Please ignore that I'm a professional DJ. That's not important. Sorry for including this information.


The need for multiple genres and artists categorization is a necessity from anyone who has a diverse music collection, not only professional DJs.


Yes, I can create as many genres as I like. But those genres don't share anything in common. For instance, tracks included in the "Techno/House" genre cannot be searched within the "Techno" or "House" genres.


I think that a more complete solution for this genre and sub-genre categorization problem is, perhaps, the inclusion of tags within the track metadata. These tags could be used to further specify the genres and characteristics of the song. For instance: "techno", "house", "detroit", "old-school" could be tags belonging for a track in the "Tech House" main electronic music genre. But the use of colons or semi-colons in the genre field to split various genres would be trivial to implement, and solve the problem equally well.


About the multiple artist problem, instead of defining featured artists, composers, remixers, conductors, etc..., it would be more much general, elegant and easy to implement a simple list of artists per song. This list could be implemented in plain text, using colons or semi-colons to split artists (like "Christian Smith; Mark Broom") in the "Artist" metadata field, or a more elegant, graphic, list control. They both solve the problem.

Jun 2, 2011 4:40 PM in response to felipead

But those genres don't share anything in common. For instance, tracks included in the "Techno/House" genre cannot be searched within the "Techno" or "House" genres.



Felipead,


If you type "techno" in the search bar, iTunes will match on tracks for both "techno" and "techno/house." In the column browser, however, they will appear as two independent genres.


As mentioned, you can make suggestions to Apple at the link provided.

Aug 15, 2011 10:42 AM in response to ed2345

Ed2345,


I believe felipead makes a very valid point by saying:


"The need for multiple genres and artists categorization is a necessity from anyone who has a diverse music collection, not only professional DJs."


I am a perfect example, I am not a professional DJ, but an audiophile nonetheless, and I have collected and imported tens of thousands of songs from my CD collections. I find the "Single Genre Mode" of iTunes lacking. I too would like to see a more elegant solution to being able to categorize individual songs and albums than the simplistic method currently in use. I have pored over several discussion boards only to find that others have discussed the same problem, and none have proposed a solution that is as elegant as Apple simply changing the ability to catalog songs and artists with multiple tags.


The only current solution I have seen to date is to put multiple tags into the Comments field, and using Smart Playlists to find songs that contain multiple tags. I find this solution inelegant as well.


One user posted the following:


"What iTunes *really* needs is user-definable tags. IIRC, the current ID3 spec allows for many more tags than iTunes makes use of. If they would allow the user to add tag categories, we could ease the overburdening of the genre and comments fields. For instance, I'd love to be able to set a specific field for Lead Vocalist, so I could readily mix songs by, for instance, Eric Clapton, Cream, and Blind Faith. Right now, I have several of this kind of datum that I'm tagging in comments with various key tags that I can set up Smart Playlists to parse, and so my Comments fields look like novels."


While this works, I would still like to be able to do what felipead suggests, i.e., be able to place a single song, album, or group of songs in multiple genres at once, and be able to choose a genre that contains songs that fall into multiple genres of the conceptual venn diagram of a diverse music collection.


kecologic

Dec 12, 2011 11:39 PM in response to felipead

I understand your frustration with this. iTunes ***** for anybody who collects more then a few albums. I am an ameture DJ and I can't stand iTunes for music management. Before I recently began to use OSX, I used Mediamonkey 4 on Windows 7. This program does everything you are asking for and more. Just this week I found that someone had ported it to OSX using Wine. You can find it here. http://www.mediamonkey.com/addons/browse/item/mac-osx-mediamonkey/


It's not the prettiest of interfaces, but it's functionality is amazing. I've been using it to build playlists for DJ sets for years. It is constantly being improved. You will not be dissapointed. Just take the time to tag your music correctly then learn the power of autoplaylists and seperate libraries. I have s seperate library for my albums and one for my singles. I can create auto-playlists like "Genre: House; Tech;/ Year; 2007 - 2011/ Mood: Upbeat/ Occasion: Warm-up; Driving; Peak/ Rating: >3.5 Stars" or "Genre: Rock; New Wave/ Year: 1978-1986/ Rating: >4 Stars" etc. The options are limitless.


Now they just have to mac a Mac OS version and all my prayers will be answered.

Feb 10, 2012 12:16 PM in response to felipead

YES! I also like those feature !

my big itunes filled up with thousand albums of classical music.
many of them are multiple artist, e.g. duet of violin concerto.

how i can edit to album artist, where two great artist are playing both equally, and itunes only detect 1 artist.


is there any itunes script that can help those mystery?


thank

Feb 20, 2012 8:48 PM in response to felipead

I agree with this post 100%


I have posted on this as well and I am dissapointed with Apple's lack of vision on this no-duh issue. Basically artists and genres in particular need to be ampersand (&) delimited or semi-colon (;) delimited. Semicolon would be better since it is less likely that the semicolon is already in use in artist and genre tags.


They are UNLIKELY to change their tagging scheme since they have to do it to their ENTIRE itunes library.


I am perfectly happy using genre tags like:

Pop & Dance & French & Vocal

Pop & German

Pop & English


Then I make a smartlist for each of the individual genre names.


This is sorta fine EXCEPT:

1. the ipad doesn't do smartlists correctly (it is broken) in the software.

2. most external control systems that can read itunes library like SONOS, Meridian Sooloos, Control4 don't recognize smartlists or multi-genre.


Unless APPLE fixes this problem, nobody else will.


J-Rivers media center for windows has addressed this problem YEARS ago.... but it still doesn't address whole house audio solutions.


NO whole house audio solution that I am aware of will delimit their artist or genre tag with ';' or '&'. It's sad but Apple is at least a decade behind on this issue and it is the only thing that ruins my experience with itunes and whole house solutions.


Music from India is COMMONLY multiartist and there is NO way to alphabetize it correctly since there may be a duo or trio of singers, all of which are "primary" singers.



If I could sit down with Apple developers for 30 minutes we could hash this out and create a truly great system... but who would ask a guy like me...


Apple doesn't really capitlize on the genius of its many customers in my opinion. Apple shoud learn to crowdsource better under Tim Cook.


Apple should hire an army of 1000 people to read these forums with its 100 billion dollar cash hoard and capitalize on a lot more suggestions in the forums. Apple should have had a comprehensive whole house audio and video system a DECADE ago with the advent of wifi ubiquity. It is silly that all they have still is airport express and airplay...


full disclosure. I am an Apple stockholder. I have never received a reply on this subject and I have posted numerous times in a variety of forums as have others. Any Indian music fan with this multi-artist debacle that is Itunes should have noticed this problem by now.

Feb 21, 2012 5:16 PM in response to KishoreY

Music from India is COMMONLY multiartist and there is NO way to alphabetize it correctly since there may be a duo or trio of singers, all of which are "primary" singers.


Kishore,

I am somewhat curious about what you would consider to be correct alphabetization of a song with multiple primary artists. When you sort by artist, do you want the song to appear in the list multiple times, once for each of the primary artists?

Feb 21, 2012 8:03 PM in response to ed2345

basically, if you delimit the artists names by a common symbol like ';' then all sorts of options open up. 1. the list could be setup to show multiple instances of the same song (not the most important thing). or more importantly 2. If I browse by artist, it wont list 3 separate artists as one artist or "various". In the artist browser, I could look up the song by any of the contributing artists without using the search function.


The same principe for genre is true. This technique has already established by J-Rivers media center for windows and it is a much more advanced system than itunes and is perfectly intuitive.


Download j-rivers media center and check it out... it leaves nothing to be desired except that it is not on the mac.

Feb 21, 2012 8:17 PM in response to KishoreY

Kishore,


So the implication is that if you sort the list by artist, it will suddenly get longer, as additional instances of any multi-artist song will appear. I can assure you that most iTunes users will find that annoying.


However, if you wish to make a suggestion to Apple, you can use the offical iTunes feedback page: http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Mar 3, 2012 8:31 AM in response to ed2345

where do I start ed? First, this is a post about how rediculous it is that iTunes can't seem to give credit to multiple artists by allowing them equal standing on songs they have collaborated equally on, and how iTunes only allows for one genre per song, when if you know anything about music you will realize that a lot of it has multiple genres and artists. Second ed, you have done nothing but argue against this, and more specifically against all the users on this thread. No one wants to listen to you because you have nothing to bring to this thread but things like "iTunes is not designed for a professional DJ. Its a consumer-grade freeware," "Using a variable number of new tags does not strike me as any more elegant than putting a bunch of text in a single field," and "I can assure you that most iTunes users will find that annoying," which no one cares about. This isn't for your oppinion of "im against anything that doesn't love iTunes," this is for everyone agreeing and putting forward new ways to improve the thing known as iTunes. So if you can't say anything to improve the system and are just responding to everyone the negative way that you are, then get off this site cause no one will want you on their thread. Im sorry for doing exactly what you're doing, but someone has gotta call you out on it. Oh yeah, and don't bother responding to me like I know you will try, because this is the first time I have been on this site, and after seeing the way a "level 6" conducts himself on threads, this is my last.

Multiple Artists and Genres per Song

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