How do I make a playlist from custom or comment tags?

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How do I make a playlist from custom or comment tags?

I recently purchased an iPod with the intent of organizing my large music library (around 800 songs). I haven't used iTunes very much before, and I'm looking for a way to mimic or duplicate the process that I used to use for tagging music and creating playlists.

When organizing many other forms of media (such as images), most software gives you the ability to add custom, group-able tags to each individual file, then make collections based off of these tags. For example, when editing the properties of image_334.jpg, you might add the following tags: "dad; brother; vacation 2012; outdoors; group". Image_338.jpg might be tagged with "sister; outdoors; close-up". Once you have all of your images tagged, you can quickly and easily create custom albums such as, "All photos from my 2012 vacation", "All photos that have both my dad and my sister in them", or even "Photos of my dad that don't include Uncle Bernie".

This way of organizing is fundamentally different than first creating a bunch of albums and adding individual photos to them. For one, you don't have to know what albums you want in advance. Second, you can organize photos as they come in, without having to guess how you want to use them later. Finally, you're albums are separate from your overall organization, so that removing a photo from an album doesn't have to mean that the photo doesn't belong, only that you don't want it displayed. My brother is still family even if I don't want a really bad photo of him to appear in my family album.

I like to organize my music the same way. The built in tags for things like Genre, Album, Title, etc, aren't inclusive enough for me. In the past, using non-iTunes software I was able to accomplish this, but I can't figure out a way to do in in iTunes. Basically, this boils down to two things.

1. The ability to add custom tags to an mp3's ID3 info. Tags are normally separated by a semi-colon. I thought that the ID3 format had a specific field for these kinds of tags, but I could be wrong, If they don't the "Comments" field should work.

2. The ability in iTunes or software that is compatible with iTunes, to search these custom tags and make playlists from them. Specifically, to make playlists from multiple tags.

For example, after appropriately tagging all of my music, I want to be able to make a playlist of "all electronic music that is both upbeat and doesn't contain any vocals." Or a playlist of "female performers from rock, EDM, but not house."

I understand that I could accomplish this by creating each of these playlists and then manually adding songs to them, but the point is to be able to easily create playlists on the fly, then manually tweak them to suit my needs/mood/purpose.

Perhaps I'm asking for the impossible, but I used to be able to do this, and with the huge iTunes community, I'm hoping that someone knows a way for me to do it again, or even a suggestion for how I might go about building this functionality myself.

iPod nano, Windows 8

Posted on Aug 23, 2015 1:16 PM

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Answer 1

hhgttg27

Level 5

5,597 points

Aug 23, 2015 1:26 PM in response to brianhvb

"I recently purchased an iPod with the intent of organizing my large music library (around 800 songs)."

Actually that's a tiny iTunes library - I don't consider mine to be particular large (I know others with libraries 2-3 the size), with just under 80,000 songs.

iTunes offers a range of metadata tags (right-click > Get Info on any song and look at each of the available tabs). However:

iTunes doesn't permit any user-defined tags in addition to those that are built in
iTunes doesn't support any multi-valued tags (so, for example, a song can only have one value for Genre)
iTunes doesn't always play well with ID3 tags defined in other software

Having said that, you may be able to make use of the built-in iTunes tags to accomplish most of what you're looking for. There are several tags that don't specifically affect iTunes operations so you can adapt these to your own needs. Once you've settled on the tags you're going to use, Smart Playlists allow you define a set of rules (based on user-editable tags, iTunes-set values such as Date Added, playcounts, etc.) with both AND and OR combinations.

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Answer 2

brianhvb Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 23, 2015 2:17 PM in response to hhgttg27

hhgttg27 wrote:

Actually that's a tiny iTunes library - I don't consider mine to be particular large (I know others with libraries 2-3 the size), with just under 80,000 songs.

Haha, ok, so "large" is very subjective. I do actually listen to all(most) of my 800 songs though. 80,000 songs * 3min/avg = 100 work weeks, or about two years of doing nothing but listening to music as a full-time job 🙂.

There are several tags that don't specifically affect iTunes operations so you can adapt these to your own needs. Once you've settled on the tags you're going to use, Smart Playlists allow you define a set of rules (based on user-editable tags, iTunes-set values such as Date Added, playcounts, etc.) with both AND and OR combinations.

Thanks, this is almost perfect. I'm a first time Apple user, and thought that smart playlists were limited to things like recently played songs, etc. Had I actually tried creating one, I would have realized that this was exactly what I was asking for. Now I just need a way to better edit or add custom tags. The comments field mostly works, but I don't have anyway to enforce that the tag I'm adding is legit, or matches with a previous tag....... If I can find this ability in an outside program (using the comments or another field), can I update the ID3 info with said program and easily get iTunes to recognize or re-import the changed tag? Or would I have to import my entire collection?

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Answer 3

hhgttg27

Level 5

5,597 points

Aug 23, 2015 2:47 PM in response to brianhvb

In general you'll find better results if you enter and edit tags within iTunes (though I've found that using Foobar2000 for this prior to importing files is close to 100% compatible). One way to understand how iTunes tagging system works is to import a few songs into it, play around with the options available in Get Info, and then see what the tags look like in another editor. In general, iTunes will simply ignore any ID3 tags that don't match its internal system. There are a couple of scenarios where problems can occur:

You may end up with MP3 files that have more than one version of the same tag (distinct ID3 versions). This can result in the situation where one version of the ID3 tag is set or updated by a 3rd party application, but iTunes reads a different version.
If you use a 3rd party tool to edit MP3 tags after songs have been added to iTunes, you won't see the results of those changes in iTunes until you play the songs.

Oh, and the average length of songs in my library is just under 5 minutes 😉

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Answer 4

turingtest2

Level 10

277,949 points

Aug 24, 2015 7:23 AM in response to brianhvb

I use the Grouping field to manage playlists for my family with / as a separator, e.g. Alice/Bob would be tracks that both Alice & Bob want. Generally Grouping contains X will work, although you may need more rules if one value appears as a substring of another that you want to use. The field is captured in tags and may show up in other media players as sub-genre or mood.

I have a script called UpdateTagInfo which can get iTunes to re-read tags that have been edited externally.

tt2

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