iTunes 12 Tagging Issues
Quite a few changes have been made concerning tagging options and accessibility in iTunes 12—for the worse. While all traditionally available fields were still available in iTunes 11—regardless the media kind—, the new iTunes update removes many of them. Most options have been adjusted to better fit the respective media. And even though I'd agree that Episode # doesn't make much sense for a record, I would still use most of the remainingvalues for most of my media.
Batch tagging your metadata has basically become impossible for most tasks. And that's not just a little annoying—it's a pain. In fact, iTunes has become somewhat useless over night. Here are just a few examples of what I'm missing:
Maybe unlike others, I've always used the Grouping field for Movies (I group film series, e.g. Planet of the Apes). It's not possible anymore. Grouping has become unavailable for Movies in iTunes 12 (apart from editing the field row by row in List View). Yes, there still is List View—the only good news so far. I also set Track # (1 of 1) and Disc # (1 of 1) for Movies. They're gone, too, meaning I would have to open each movie separately in Subler or iDentify and set those values manually—four times each item in this example. Have you ever tried doing that for a couple of hundred movies?
Maybe unlike others, I've always used the Description, Show, and Episode ID fields for Music (I fill in album release notes, dates and venues for live recordings, among other things). It's not possible anymore. Description, Show, Episode ID, and many other fields have become unavailable for Music in iTunes 12.
This list goes on and on . . .
Oddly enough, I haven't even been able to batch tag the fields that iTunes has left us to play around with. When trying to edit the genre for a bunch of movies today, the error message was "Your selection contains more than one kind of media." (see image), which is, of course, also not true.
I wonder how other iTunes power users—and I really don't like that phrase—are dealing with this, and I'm looking forward to reading about your first impressions, experiences so far, as well as sharing reasonable workarounds.
As I said earlier in this thread (Tagging working differently in iTunes 12 ?): It more and more looks like they're trying to get rid of power users in order to make us buy stuff from the iTunes store instead of managing our own media with their software.
PS: Ripping a CD has become painfully slow, taking almost 20 minutes per album. But I'm hoping this is an issue Apple is actuallygoing to fix soon, while I'm not so sure about the others.
