Multiple Artists and Genres per Song

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

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

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.

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?

"And it's a pretty old request too - dated from 2003."

It's quite simple to understand why Apple continue to ignore this sugesstion since introducing this feature in iTunes will not make Apple any money. they lost their soul with the iPod in 2001 and lost all hope of getting it back in 2007 when they released the iPhone. Apple is now a money machine just like the Microsofts of this world except they still pretend to be caring, sharing altruistic etc.

In fact this feature is already available from Apple.... In the iTunes STORE.

For example if you browse violinist 'David Garrett' the iTunes Store will list both his individual songs AND his collaborations with other artists such as the 'Royal Philharmonic Orchestra' (all available for just 0.79p!!!) I'm sorry if I sound like a cynical troll but this quite annoys me.

Apple have obviously developed the feature but then decided not to incorporate it into iTunes perhaps because they think it will 'complicate' the program for their core market... but does their 'core market' not use the store? The store is designed very well to 'streamline' customers from A to P(urchase) and one of the ways to do this is to incude intelligent tagging so that a customer does not 'miss out' on the opportunity to buy a track just because it doesn't match with the 'primary artist tag'

The only way I can see Apple introducing this feature is if they dont have anything more pressing on their advertising agenda and their marketing department find a way of making a snazzy ad video about how this feature is wonderful, amazing, and 'new'.

N.B. I'm not a professional just a normal user with a diverse library.

Well said comment...

The solution to this problem overall is simple.

If I pull out my Ipod, and go to the section to browse by artist, then all artists would be listed individually in the list if they are separated in a song by the '&' symbol. In the main music list in itunes, this would not result in multiple copies of the file.

The same situation would apply in the genre browser. If there is a tag with "POP & Chinese" then the song would appear if I was searching in pop OR Chinese. It would not show a Genre called "POP & Chinese" in the genre browser. It would show POP and Chinese SEPARATELY in the list!!!

This is not a issue of some programming esoterica nor does it require some super genius to figure out.

Wake up Apple programmers....

Even smartlists are broken in the ipad/ipod and don't work the same way as they do in itunes. WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT A5X chip that you can't fix this problem? I make a smartlist for the genre section at least and this allows me to accomplish what I stated above with genres by using the smartlists instead of the genre browser.

The artist browser and genre browser are worthless to me... since MANY of my songs have multi-artist and multi-genre separated by '&' and the stupid browser lists all the permutations instead of delimiting the genres and artists.

My genre list looks sorta like this:

Pop & chinese & instrumental

Pop & japanese

Pop & Soundtrack & Anime & Japanese

Pop & score & anime

Pop & chinese & vocal

Pop & electronica

What a mess... but I can't categorize my stuff any other way without making it hard to decide which place to put a song. Does a chinese soundtrack pop song get filed under chinese? or pop? or soundtrack? I SHOULD be able to find the song regardless of which sub-genre I look under in the genre browser.

This is basically simple. The people that understand this are basically right and Apple is WRONG on this... no matter what detractors on this thread say. The devices and software could easily be tweaked to dramatically improve the user experience but Apple is poor at getting involved in discussion forums like this to allow us to help them fix these issues. Some of the product developers on the app store are far more receptive to suggestions than Apple is. They are not getting enough of the advantages of crowd sourcing.

I would fly out to Cupertino and correct MANY UI mistakes/errors for them if they will have me out there...

I'll hold my breath and wait for a message to have me come out there. There are still a lot of things about OSX and iOS that can be made simpler too. still FAR too much extraneous junk and poor implementation of cloud capabilities.

Why on earth does itunes have a "get info" menu dropdown to get into track data? Why is the track data separated into 7 submenus separated by tabs? The whole data entry situation in itunes is way too complex. It's downright painful.

Why are there no 24bit audio files yet for premium prices? Are the people at apple doing too much LSD? WHAT IS GOING ON? You have to be disabled not to hear the difference between great recordings and that 256kbps garbage the peddle. come to my house on the 107db sensitivity speakers with a Class A amplifier and tell me you can't tell the difference and I will have your hearing checked.

hopefully the itunes department will contact someone on this thread to provide a list of the mistakes in itunes/ipod software so the problems can all be fixed.

An AUDIOPHILE needs to take over itunes and fix this nonsense STAT. It's simply embarassing at this point. Where are my 24 bit files on my 1000gb ipod? WHY IS THERE NO AUDIOPHILE IPOD? They can use there 100 billion cash hoard and make a GOOD home distribution system beyond "airplay/airport".

Why is mediocrity being considered at Apple when they do so many other things great? Considering I own half a million dollars in stock, believe me I do appreciate the company at large. I am only ranting about the treatment of audiophiles and the complete dumbing down of the music experience to mass garbage when we live in the 21st century. What we see is important (retina display) but what we hear is not?

/rant off...

Apple feel free to contact me and I can tell you how to develop the BEST product for music ever implemented... I don't need compensation... I want products that I WANT to buy!!!!

I totally agree with everyone's comment here !! (except maybe ed2345...) .

Not only that music genres are subjectives, but they can represent a music style, a type of music or even an 'era' ! I mean take for instance Pink Floyd. It's definetly rock, but you could mark it psychedelic, philosophical or even soft rock. What about all those new indie bands that are rock, alternative and folk all together ? I'd even like to mark some '80's music' as they are not from the 80's but certainly play kind of 80's music ! And when they get popular, they become Pop ! Can't they still be folk ?? ... The black keys is a good exemple of this...

The only reason I would think apple would hold off on this is the devices... I mean if they enable that semicolon feature, they will also need to ensure the apple devices all work with it correctly ! You would probably see too many genres on your ipod\iphone device unless you update your device. That gap between the an iTunes and device upgrade could be a turn off for Apple, but I'm sure there is a way to force an ipod\iphone upgrade if you did it with itunes regardless of your device generation.

I don't even use my iPod (lost it and sync my music to my blackberry until my company upgrades to the iPhone) but love itunes and the istore... I'm confident adding that multiple genres options wouldn't be much for them!!!!!

Its a funny feeling coming across this thread, as I have searched the Internet for a solution for just this very problem. Just recently I stopped using Windows Media Player completely and changed to iTunes, as I thought that could be just as well since I need iPods for training and the car and whatnot. So, why have more than one program, I thought.

The reason is what you describe so very well here. My problem is not so much the genres although that annoys me too, but mainly artists. It annoys me so greatly that a Daughtry-song featuring Slash (for example) can not be displayed correctly. In iTunes there as sort of work arounds if you disregard the search functions (which I find it hard to do), but on the iPod it doesn't work even a little. My options are either having the song removed from Daughtry's songs or not being displayed right.

I never thought a Windows product would be so far ahead of Apple, but so be it. Are there any real chances Apple will fix this? And can it really be that difficult to fix if the functions are in a free Microsoft-program?

Just finaly another question. The sort by-function words kind of weird on the iPod. If you for example under artist write Daughtry/Slash, but chooses to sort by Daughtry, then on the iPod there are all of sudden three artists. Daughtry, Daughtry/Slash and Daughtry again. But none of the two Daughtry options holds the song with Daughtry/Slash. All very weird to me.

There NEEDS to be an '&' delimiting built into itunes for genres and artists ... this much is certain.

To itunes credit, the smartlists are GREAT... unfortunately they cannot be used by most third party systems such as Control4 or media servers.

Also I like the fact that my "soundtracks" smartlist can be orgranized by Album instead of artist... This is a huge help that other media playback software do NOT do.

I really do think Itunes has LOT going for it but could learn a few things from J Rivers Media Center in terms of Artist and Genre listing.

On a side note, APPLE TV would be a decent media server for the home given that it has playlists but it needs to be Rs-232 or IP controllable so that home automation gear such as CONTROL4 can easily get acces to smartlists, transport controls, etc. I DO NOT WANT TO TURN MY TV ON TO LISTEN TO MUSIC... duh.

This has been my number one feature request for years and actually held me back from getting an ipod as windows media player functionality is lightyears ahead. in wmp you can browse 'contributing artists' which shows a list of all arists in the artist field with multiple artists seperated by semi colon.

Once you have experienced the amazing usability of being able to click on say 'Elton John' and see a list of songs which are labelled as being only by 'Elton John' as well as any other song which includes 'Elton John' for example 'Elton John; Eminem' and then being able to look at 'Eminem' and also see tracks by 'Elton John; Eminem'

The same applies to genres which should work more like a tag system. Seeing 'Vocal' under the genres list and being able to see all tracks which have 'Vocal' in the genre field regardless if they also have other tags in the genre field is a hugely useful feature.

Anyone who has got used to this feature finds it almost impossible to live without. How long before itunes catches up with nearly every other popular media player?

So perhaps my reading comprehension skills are lacking, or I'm just confused about exactly what is being requested (I suspect it's the former). I'm super OCD about my music tags and organizations. I find it difficult to sort single tracks in iTunes, and wish there was just a check-off box to mark something as a single and have it in it's own section or list.

I don't really have a problem with multiple genres or artists, though, and smart playlists solve most of my sorting issues. If I have an album with multiple artists, I just mark it as a compilation and then each track shows the name of the track and underneathe it shows all the artists on that track. I have a smart playlist created for compilations and soundtracks.

When I'm entering genres in album or song info, I just seperate the genres by commas. For example I consider Stevie Wonder (personally) to be soul, funk. If I list them both, I can then make a smart playlist that contains "funk" and "hip-hop" for example and it will include Stevie Wonder in this playlist as well as my hip hop tracks. You could even go as far as to selectively add slightly different genres within a Stevie Wonder album, etc.

I know that with electronic and rap music, etc, there are tons of sub-genres, but why not just write those in commas and then make a smart playlist choosing which genres you want to include? Is this not the functionality that is being requested? Or is it that you want there to be checkboxes for various genres? I actually find that typing in whatever I want leads to basically unlimited sorting potential via smart playlists.

If I was a DJ, I would just add my own tags in comments or genre (ie upbeat, kids, indie, dance party, whatever) and then make a smart playlist to include whatever tags that are appropriate for the audience of the night, then reorder accordingly...

Since I'm more than a little OCD, it actually drives me crazy when tracks show up in multiple places. This happens to me sometimes when I have a soundtrack with a song that is also on an album from the same artist, and if I sort by artist I see the song twice.

I'm assuming that I am misunderstanding the feature that is being requested, because I'm all for more iTunes functionality and think there's a lot of things frustrating about iTunes, but as long as you're using smart playlists it seems like it would be quite easy to make playlists with specific artists, genres, or tags.

Edited to add: didn't mean to one specific person, but the thread in general :)

While using commas in the genre field in conjunction with smart playlists works, they are work arounds for the lack of a native multiple genre tagging function. Working with my tracks should be easy, not more work by creating a slew of smart playlists to filter them out.

So I guess what this is about is the "Genre" tab in iTunes being filled with a ton of random genre types if you seperate things by commas? I get this, and that is annoying. I just ignore my genre tab completely since it's pointless and always has been. It would be nice if the genre tab would automatically recognize that genres seperated by commas should be included within each other (for example if an album/song is tagged as (Hip-hop, Funk) it should show up in both the Hip-hop and Funk genres and not in a new "Hip-hop, Funk" genre.

If this is what people are talking about, I agree that this would be better than the current genre tab. Right now my genres tab is totally pointless and filled with a zillion random different genres.

I do think that even if this functionality was added, I would still use smart playlists rather than genres. It's rare I only want to listen to one specific genre, rather I want to listen to a combination of genres that fit a general mood. Nawmean? Do away with my genre tab IMO, seems like smart playlists are a far better way of sorting your music and creating custom playlists.

Edit: In my case, if multiple genres were enabled in the way being discussed, I would end up with so many albums and songs being in more than one place, which would drive me a bit crazy.

Smart playlists are well and good, especially for creating a playlist that includes multiple genres or a selection of specific artists. But can you imagine trying to create a smart playlist for every artist as well, just so you can see all tracks (including collaborations) by them. Obviously you would just use the search field on a computer, but on an ipod etc smart playlists would be the only way. I'll come back to artists in a minute. The best set up for genres would be for the genres tab to act like a filter rather than a list, showing all sub genres as separate. So if I enter 'funk; soul' in a genre field for a track, the genre tab/list shows 'funk' and 'soul' as separate items but clicking 'funk' for example will show not only tracks labelled with just 'funk' but also 'funk; soul' 'funk; hip hop' and any other tracks which include the label funk. Yes this could be achieved to some extent with smart playlists but with my approach you have an automatically updated definitive list of all genres and sub genres, whereas with smart playlists you would have to spend a long time manually creating smart playlists if you wanted instant access to any sub genre in your library. Plus, it could be difficult to keep updated. For example if you added a new track to your library and were filling in the genre field with relevant tags, if the genre list worked as i would like, you wouldn't need to worry about whether all the tags you were adding were included in a smart playlist, you would know that any new sub genre or tag that you added for the first time would be instantly accessible later from the genre panel. With regards to artists... I think the best approach is for the 'album artists' field to remain as it is, but the 'artists' field to act like a 'contributors' field. It should work in the same way as I mentioned for genres so a track labelled as being by 'jay-z; rhianna' would be accessible from either artist in the artists tab/browser. The album artist field only needs to be used in the albums section so that albums from the same artist can be grouped. Trying to use smart playlists to access all tracks by each artist as well as all sub genres is not a practical way to manage a large and varied music library, particularly if you add new tracks regularly. You would also need to add a 'genre' or 'artist' prefix to your smart lists to keep them together but it would still be a pain having so many. With regards to this issue of duplicates, the 'song' and 'album' sections would just be lists not filters so you would still see 'funk; soul' next to a track, there would be no duplicates and if you ordered the list by genre (which you would never do if the genre tab provided access to all separated genres) it would alphabetise them by whichever order you entered them like it does at the moment if you separate genres with a comma. I don't understand how anyone can think this system doesn't need an overhaul. The only problem is integration with the iTunes Store and getting record labels to use these naming conventions for multiple artists. For this reason sadly I don't think we will ever see these features...

A good example of the need for multiple artists... Lets say you have a library with 1000+ artists. You have a favourite rapper. You remember that a few years ago he teamed up with an obscure jazz musician for a track on the musicians album. The track artist label was 'musicians name' featuring 'rappers name'. You know you have the track in your library but you can't remember the name of the musician! On a computer you could search the name of the rapper, but on an iPod without search, how would you find the track? With multiple artist functionality the track would be listed under the rappers name as well as the musician. Many non iTunes portable players work this way and its an intuitive and addictive system. Maybe I'm being dim but I don't understand the concern about duplicates or things showing up in more than one place. Can someone explain what they mean...