Comments on: What is iTunes “Grouping” column for?

By: Jthekk2

Jthekk2 — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:28:55 +0000

I have a lot of different jazz groups that have overlapping members and such. I have the artist as the person who actually released the album, and under the grouping, I put that artists name as well as any prominent artists that I have other music for. That way, I can use the grouping tag to create smart playlists that have those artists songs over all the different albums from different artists, whether it be one song from the album or all of the songs.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:54:05 +0000

This relates to the reply made by Peter last April regarding using grouping to keep various album titles grouped together (ie multiple CDs in one box set, each with a differing album title). He said that using the grouping field he could tag all the CDs within the same set and keep them together. What I need to know is if this affects the coverflow view or album grid to group these albums under ONE art. I haven’t been able to figure out how to make this happen, if it is at all possible, and have an album that is one artist, but divided into different “acts.” The best way I could think to differentiate the different acts on the album was to group the songs in an act in it’s own folder and change the name of the album tag to reflect which act those particular tracks covered. While this works as a list, it does not allow me to view the album as a “whole” using the coverflow view. It seems the only way to merge differently tagged tracks is if the ALBUM title is the same even if their are multiple artists. I’ve tried using the grouping, sorting, and “part of a compilation” options with no success. Is there any way to merge these tracks under one album art while retaining the different album names?

By: Anaya

Anaya — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:53:51 +0000

I found the grouping field to be useful in my music collection because I listen to music in 3 different languages, English, Korean, and Japanese. Sometimes I just want to listen to songs in one of those three languages so the having the language of the song filled in the grouping field (and having that field being displayed in iTunes) really simplified that process. If only my iPod Classic would support playing by the Grouping field, my life would be complete. But it doesn’t so I’ve been resorting to using playlists. Oh well.

By: cgudrian

cgudrian — Sun, 17 May 2009 10:15:07 +0000

The problem with using ‘Grouping’ for tagging is that you cannot add a certain tag to a bunch of songs. It would just replace the previous contents of the Grouping field with the one tag you would have liked to be added. You have to tag all of your songs one by one. That’s not feasible at all. I wonder if there exists a script which can manage tags appropriately in that way.

By: MGP

MGP — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 05:40:03 +0000

Hi Guys - No one has mentioned the page in Get Info entitled ” Sorting”. It seems I cannot type into it at the import stage - although later after importing one can. Does anyone know how this page fits in to all the above?

By: UnoNoOo

UnoNoOo — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:17:40 +0000

It has been my experience, that songs tagged as being in a compilation, will not show up in an artist search on the ipod classic, & this is a deal breaker for me, because half of all my music would have to be tagged in compilations. Therefore I don’t use coverflow on the ipod. Its function is the same as the album category. I too have many duplicate songs & if I was to start over again, I probably would have used playlists to a greater extent, to reduce the duplicates, but with over 20k songs, retagging isn’t in the cards.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:26:58 +0000

@Akara: I use the Comments field for something similar. For example, if my parents are over for dinner I don’t want to play songs with explicit lyrics. I created a smart playlist with criteria “Comment”, “does not contain”, “explicit”. As long as all the songs are tagged appropriately, this works great.

By: Akara

Akara — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:22:19 +0000

Interesting to read Owen’s post.

Am wanting to use Something to add keywords to my tracks for when I DJ.

E.g. I have a list of Deep House I also have a list of Beach House

Some songs are in both lists.

I’d love to tag all the tracks appropriately, then, when I get a new song, just add the appropriate tags…then have itunes automatically be able to search or create playlists that allow me to see all the different combinations…

deep and NOT beach deep AND beach beach and NOT deep etc etc…upto however many different keywords I give.

Ideas people?

By: NjitS

NjitS — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:40:05 +0000

Thanks for your replies guys! obviously i didn’t really get the answer i was looking for (”oh that’s really easy, just press this and this button in that and that menu!”) but, well, ‘you can’t always get what you want’ right? I’ll just have to live with some wasted disk-space untill the iTunes-people come up with some fancy soluton for it.. thanks again and happy new year to all!

By: Sebhelyesfarku

Sebhelyesfarku — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:03:37 +0000

“If you have a 1 MB image assigned to an album of 18 tracks, that’s 18MB”

That’s BS. A normal 500×500px album art picture is about 50-100KB.