Hi,
I'm using iTunes since the very beginning to organize my digital music. To find specific titles I add coments to the meta data of each title.
Up to a short while ago I was able to search my comments in iTunes, but it seems as if I cannot do that anymore. For me, that's a catastrophe! Am I doing something wrong? How can I still use my thousands of comments?
Hi Frank,
The only way I know to take advantage of all this metadata is via smart playlists, using a rule like Comments > include > [keyword]. It's not as convenient, but at least all that effort is not lost.
Hi Frank,
The only way I know to take advantage of all this metadata is via smart playlists, using a rule like Comments > include > [keyword]. It's not as convenient, but at least all that effort is not lost.
Do you have the comments field displayed in your list view?
Thx! Good idea.
It's indeed a way to use comments, but in normal life (I have to search ten thousands of titles for hundreds of keywords) I am afraid that is not a working solution ...😟).
Frank
Here's a possibility. I have not tested this, but there's a Doug's Applescript called "This Tag That Tag" that will copy information from one field to another:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=thistagthattag
Perhaps you could copy the contents of your Comments fields into another field that is searchable in iTunes -- e.g., Grouping.
This is a paid (though cheap) utility, but you can try it for 10 days to see if it works. All the Doug's scripts I've used have been good and problem-free.
Hi Richard,
good thought, thank you.
But currently iTunes seems to search only in title, album, artist and composer – tag fields that I use as well.
If I would use, let's say, the composer field for comments and descriptions
- I cannot search for composers anymore
- I have lengthy comments in the composer field (that don't really belong there) ...
Not really great, either ...
I wish, Apple would just include that field back in search as it did for many years before. I cannot see any advantage in excluding it. I use it as a tool for my work and don't understand, why the take it out of the search since anybody who wants just search in titles or so, can do that anyway.
I don't use iTunes 12. Did they remove this recently? This article about using iTunes 12 says it is there:
iTunes 12 for Mac: Find items and duplicates
"To search song comments, make sure the Comments column is displayed (choose View > Show View Options)."
Hi Limnos,
thank you. You're right, that's what it says in that article.
I double checked it strangely it worked on some phrases and didn't on others. So I played around a bit and I found a strange bug (which I haven't completely deciphered):
Searching for comments works sometimes.
If I search for the first word or phrase of the comment, it works often – but it often does not work, if you use a long phrase containing a ",", ".", "-" or ":" between phrases.
For example, if I search for "a compilation of out-of-print and previously unreleased tracks" iTunes doesn't find it.
But if I search for "a compilation", it finds the comment above.
If I then again search for "a compilation of out-of-print and previously unreleased tracks" right afterwords, it finds it.
But if I search something else in between and start over it is as in the beginning.
Or:
If I search for "Amazon.com Song ID: 206168977" it doesn't find it.
If I search for "Amazon.com" it doesn't find it.
But if I search for "Amazon" only, it finds a number of songs, including the one.
If I then search for "Amazon.com Song ID: 206168977" it does find the song.
If I then search for something else and try the same search again it suddenly works.
But the search above still doesn't.
I haven't quite figured it out yet, but it looks like something that can and should be fixed. Sonds like the index isn't complete or so ...
So let's hope they look into it and fix it with the next update.
Thank you everybody!
I can't experiment right now but I wondering if you are bumping up against the hidden computer code in iTunes. ":" for example is used to denote a file path in Macs.
Search in comments
