5th
My craze for iPods went down one notch yesterday night.
The way I organize my music collection is that I am very tagging-crazy; thanks in part to iTunes. Before iTunes, my collection was a mess, just organized into folder names corresponding to albums and no regard given to the tags. Even when songs were tagged, there were usually typos and missing information.
iTunes changed all that. If you remember, the first versions of Windows iTunes had the option to ‘organize the music folders automatically’ checked by default. So I installed iTunes, pointed it to my music collection, and boom! my entire collection was turned into a mess (coz iTunes organizes by the artist and then album names, and this info was lacking).
I spent the next 4 years tagging away. And I ensured that every new song I added has proper tags and album art etc (which was a good idea, coz a few versions later iTunes had Cover Flow and iPods showed album art and I was ready!).
Yesterday I encountered a problem though.
You see, since I am tagging-crazy and I don’t want to miss out any info for each song, I make it a point to put all the artist details in each song. So, for instance, a song by Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustaad Alla Rakha Khan would have these two as the “Artists”, while a song by Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustaad Zakir Hussain would have these two as the “Artists”. If I wasn’t so particular, I could omit the two Ustaads coz they are not the main artists; but I am particular, and I want to give credit to the two Ustaads coz I feel they are an important part of the performance, and so I put their names too in the “Artists” field.
Further, I put Pt. Ravi Shankar as the “Album Artist”. The album belongs to him, after all, and while each track might have him and another artist just for that particular piece, I like to have all these tracks appear together and under Pt. Ravi Shankar’s name. The “Album Artist” field is for that, and iTunes thankfully honours it. It stores all these tracks together on the disk too. So far so good.
The problem is that for some unknown reasons, iPods don’t care about the “Album Artist” tag! There’s no way I can browse by Album Artist on the iPod. So when I go to a particular genre (e.g. “Classical Indian”) and then browse by artists, I have multiple entries - “Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustaad Alla Rakha”, and “Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustaad Zakir Hussain”. Both these tracks might be from the same album even, but they’ll appear separately. And so, on my iPod: (1) the artist list is huge and messed up, and (2) if I want to play other tracks from that same album, I’ll have to choose the song and then hold the menu button to get the “Browse Album” option, then select the album, and then play all songs in it. Very cumbersome. And not neat and elegant as you’d expect Apple products to be.
I spent a good part of yesterday midnight trying to find a solution for this. Many posts on the Internet said I could make the iPods work around this by checking the “Compilation” box and using the “Sort Artist” field. None of them worked for me, unfortunately.
I guess the only option I have is to change my iPod browsing habits. After drilling down by Genre, I mustn’t browse by artist, but must instead choose the “All Albums” option and then browse by albums. This way I can see all the albums along with the artist names beneath it. This is an extra click for me, but seeing that there are many posts on the Internet asking for this feature and Apple hasn’t implemented it yet, I guess there’s nothing else to do. :-/
