Michal Ždanský Each of us has a collection of music, and if we own an iOS device or an iPod, we probably sync this music to these devices as well. But it often happens that when you drag a collection into iTunes, the songs are completely scattered, not organized by artist or album, and have names that do not match the file name, for example "Track 01", etc. Songs downloaded from the iTunes Store do not have this problem, but if they are files from another source, you may encounter this problem.
In this tutorial, we will show you how it is possible to have all the songs beautifully arranged, including album art, exactly as we can see on Apple's website. First of all, you need to know that iTunes completely ignores the names of music files, only the metadata stored in them is important. For music files (mainly MP3s), this metadata is called ID3 tags. These contain all the information about the song – title, artist, album and album image. There are various applications for editing this metadata, however, iTunes itself will provide very quick editing of this data, so there is no need to download additional software.
- Editing each song individually would be tedious, luckily iTunes also supports bulk editing. First, we mark the songs in iTunes that we want to edit. Either by holding down CMD (or Ctrl in Windows) we select specific songs, if we have them below, we mark the first and last song by holding down SHIFT, which also selects all the songs between them.
- Right-click on any song in the selection to bring up a context menu from which to select an item Information (Get Info), or use the shortcut CMD+I.
- Fill in the fields Artist and Artist of the album identically. As soon as you change the data, a check box will appear next to the field, this means that the given items will be changed for all selected files.
- Similarly, fill in the name of the album, optionally also the year of publication or genre.
- Now you need to insert the album image. It must first be searched on the Internet. Search Google for images by album title. The ideal image size is at least 500×500 so that it is not blurred on the retina display. Open the found image in the browser, right-click on it and put Copy image. No need to download it at all. Then in iTunes, click on the field in Information Graphics and paste the image (CMD/CTRL+V).
Note: iTunes has a feature to automatically search for album art, but it's not very reliable, so it's often better to manually insert an image for each album.
- Confirm all changes with the button OK.
- If the song titles don't match, you need to fix each song separately. However, there is no need to open Info every time, just click on the name of the selected song in the list in iTunes and then overwrite the name.
- Songs are automatically sorted alphabetically for albums. If you want to keep the same order as the artist intended for the album, it is not necessary to name the songs with the prefix 01, 02, etc., but in Information assign Track number for each individual song.
- Organizing a large library in this way can take up to an hour or two, but the result will be worth it, especially on your iPod or iOS device, where you will have the songs properly sorted.
So I don't have a problem with the library, I basically buy music on the iTunes Store. And what I previously recorded from purchased CDs is also in my pocket. Shouldn't there be advice for warez people?
well, I mostly have CDs or itunes, and the itunes library also sometimes gives me crazy meta tags and so on.
Quite commendable, I don't have a problem with this, it's worse with soundtracks and compilations, where I'm scattered by authors, while I definitely prefer sorting by albums, but I can usually deal with that :-)
The item "Album interpreter" can be used beautifully for this, which in this case will not be filled in the same way as in the instructions, but according to my needs.
exactly, the artist of the album is also good for when you have an album that must have been made by a DJ, but individual songs have an artist DJ feat Nekdo, so it doesn't turn into a joke artist... I hope that's understandable :D
Can this be done before putting it into the iTunes library? Because if I load it first, then I have to search for it anyway…
it doesn't work, I'm doing it in such a way that I have an empty test playlist where I upload the downloaded album - and it didn't work in the library... The playlist must be switched to LIST mode in itunes 11 (top right) otherwise the songs won't appear there - some error - see my comments on an older article about iTunes 11 on applecart
As I said, set the COMPILATION tag to 1 and it's done, no messing around :-)
I need to use compition only for audiobooks, so that they don't mix between musical performers in the folder on the disc
Nenene, the correct procedure is to set the COMPILATION tag to 1 for the compilation. The artist of the album is (from its name already) intended for something else :-)
In addition, such an album is correctly displayed in the Music app on the Compilation tab, and not Albums.
Select full album, album artist " ", check compilations and it should show as full album under "various artists"
So this has been bugging me for a long time…. Thanks :)
This would be easily resolved if iTunes Match corrected the meta information. I don't understand why it doesn't..
If you have a song and you don't have a picture with it and itunes doesn't search for it either, you just have to find the specific song on itunes and add the album name, track number, etc. correctly in the song settings... and I also recommend checking the length of the song. And then you just have to search again - and that's it:) Assigning the right image to a song is quite an interesting activity as a result, and you learn a lot about the artist and thus buy a lot of songs:)...
that's not enough, iTunes records albums based on whether you've bought them - based on your digital fingerprint, not just by name. Sometimes it works with warez, but from personal experience not so much...
it worked almost all the time for me
so I envy you, almost not me at all
-for me it also surprisingly works 100%… :)… It is quite important to fill in everything correctly according to the iTunes store in the song. When it didn't work for me, I either messed up the title or the song was otherwise long.
Oh great, thanks!
even though I have most of the library downloaded, I have the order and the correct covers in it... but it seems to me that when I upload it to the ipod, almost all the covers fall apart... does anyone know what to do with this?
I don't know if anyone has registered it, but when I attach an image downloaded somewhere from the Internet to the song and then it is paired with the phone, it is usually not visible. When I click on the song and then turn the phone, it is visible until it starts scrolling. I have not registered this problem with purchased songs. I thought it might be due to the wrong size or low resolution, but it is not. I haven't solved it much yet, because I have a lot of songs bought, but in principle it's a mystery :)
it did 3G for me and helped to restore and restore the phone from backup
If you don't want to search for everything that starts with "the" under T, you can use the artist's alias, or Albums.
Thank you very much for the article :D I had a big problem with it :D
I personally recommend the Mp3tag program.. I switched to it for several reasons. 1. Metadata can be seen in it, which cannot be seen in iTunes (hidden comments, part of the set and much more) and thing 2. that it happened to me how many times iTunes missed recording the metadata (e.g. the album sort was for 16 songs out of 20) song's album - metadata for album sorting was simply missing for 4 songs... I hope it helps someone. Peace apple
Honestly? Fuck it whether you like it or not. And an hour or two is too enthusiastic for a person with a more comprehensive library. A day or two would be useful there. Anyway, good luck to everyone ;)
I have 800 albums. Practically a complete set stored in ALAC from the original CD. Except for the occasional song selection, if there are more artists on the album, it can be set simply by the artist of the album, but iTunes is reliable. Occasional reshart necessary. It happens that the songs are saved and the album is not visible. OK after reboot. Lev has recently been unable to save a few songs, about 6, to i Cloud, I assume an error in vi Cloud.
I also forgot to add that there is a lot of chaos on the iPad2 via iCloud. Some albums are not displayed according to the author, for other authors the number of albums is almost double. The graphics are not completely complete, about 800 of the 25 albums do not load. It is interesting that if it is, for example, a doubleCD, the graphics are on one and not on the other, but this is not always the case. I think someone mentioned restore here. I haven't tried that, but I bought a new iPad Mini and everything is OK there.