IPOD question

[nmorin]

Sorry if this is a silly question, but here goes…

Everyone has their own way of organizing their music. I have ripped most of my jazz CDs to my PC as MP3s. By artist, I organize the studio sessions chronologically, with each year getting its own folder. So, for example, all of Miles’ various 1958 sessions are in one folder in recording order.

If get an IPOD, can the music be organized how I want it—how I currently have it on my PC? Or does it look at the artist and album tags on each MP3 and build a filesystem from the tag info? So, for example, I’ll end up three folders for Ellington: Duke Ellington, Duke Ellington & His Orchestra, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, and Miles' "Morpheus" and "Tasty Pudding" will be stuck together since they were on his "And Horns" album though they were recorded two years apart.

Thanks!

[rostasi]

Definitely not a silly question.

Since you're referring to folders and not playlists,

I think that it files according to tags and then divides up the

complete list according to:

• Playlists

• Artists

• Albums

• Songs

• Podcasts

• Genres

• Composers

• Audiobooks

Then, within each area you can listen randomly or in a series.

Not really sure about intricately created files 'cause

I just dump the lot on it and hit random.

The only non-artist file that I think that I have on iTunes

is a "Various Artist" file and it comes thru just fine on the iPod.

(Artists/various artists/all). So, I'd think that your "1958" file would read just like that.

Is your 1958 file listed under "Artists", or "Albums", etc? Then you choose that:

(______/1958/Miles Davis)

Edited October 29, 2006 by rostasi

[Tom Storer]

The first thing to know is that you organize your music first in iTunes, the application that comes with your iPod, and then use iTunes to transfer the music to your iPod. When adding music from a CD and converting to MP3, yes, iTunes gets the tags from the CD. If you haven't changed the tags on your MP3s that's no doubt how they'll be identified in iTunes. But you can edit the tags easily in iTunes to make them what you want.

There are many ways to categorize music and you can sort in iTunes by any category, including year. However, the iPod itself has more limited display possibilities.

As rostasi noted, on the iPod you can look at your music in the following ways:

- by playlist

- by artist

- by album

- by song

- by podcast

- by genre

- by composer

- by audiobook

I suggest you enter, in the Album field, the artist name and session ID, including year (for example "Duke Ellington 1958-31-10 NYC" or whatever information you want to store there).

That way, when you look at the list of Albums (meaning sessions in your case), you'll see the artist and year information for each session, and they'll be alphabetized by artist name.

If you only store by year, and not by any further session subdivision, you can just enter "Duke Ellington 1958" as the album name for all tracks Ellington recorded in 1958. From the iPod's point of view, it will be one album entitled "Duke Ellington 1958."

You can store so many albums (or sessions) on an iPod that I find it indispensable to include the artist name with the album name. I name my albums in the form "artist name, album name." That way when I see an album like "Live at the Village Vanguard" or "Plays Gershwin" I know which one it is--I see "Bill Evans, Live at the Village Vanguard" or "John Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard."

As long as you're organized in your data entry--which I suspect you will be if you've already gone to the trouble of storing your MP3s by recording session!--you should be able to categorize like this and see your music by artist, by year.

Edited October 29, 2006 by Tom Storer

[DukeCity]

Every time I load an album into iTunes, I create a new playlist for that album. I type it myself, and use the artist/group name and then the album title.

example: Bill Evans- Interplay

Makes it easy to scroll thru the albums on my computer, and also easy to look thru on my iPod.

[Deuterium]

I organize my albums as Tom suggested. One additional thought, you can do all of the tunes on an album at once by selecting them all and using the control key with the mouse go to "get info". Within the window that pops up, you can modify the fields and it will apply them to all of the tunes you have selected.

[John L]

I would also highly recommend the choosing the "organize my music" option in the iTunes preferences. What this does is the following: When you decide on how you want to organize your music through the editing options in iTunes, iTunes will automatically organize your MP3 folders (in the iTunes directory folder) around the same principles and with the same new labels. This has a lot of advantages. You can find your MP3 files quickly if needed. If your iTunes program or computer hard drive crashes and you have your MP3 files backed up (as you should), you can restore your whole iTunes libraary in a matter of minutes on another computer, or with another downloaded iTunes program.

Edited October 30, 2006 by John L

[Tom Storer]

Thanks for that tip, John. One question: if your MP3s are not all in the iTunes Library folder to begin with, what does the "organize my music" operation do with them:

- move them to iTunes Library folder (so they're no longer where they used to be)

- move a copy of them to the iTunes Library folder

- leave them where they are

?

[Harold_Z]

If your iTunes program or computer hard drive crashes and you have your MP3 files backed up (as you should), you can restore your whole iTunes libraary in a matter of minutes on another computer, or with another downloaded iTunes program.

I just got an IPOD and I'm pretty much a novice on it.

How do you back up the files? Just save them to a disc?

Also..if I enter a homemade cdr is there a way to enter the titles and artist for each track?

[Tom Storer]

To back up files, just burn them to CDs or DVDs, or copy them to a separate hard disk if you have one.

Yes, when you enter music from a homemade CD, you can enter all the information you want in iTunes.

Here's a very handy thing for all iPod users on Windows (John L, take note): SharePod, a program that you store on your iPod as a file (not added through iTunes). Once it's on your iPod, just double-click the sharepod.exe file in Windows Explorer and the application starts. Using it, you can copy music that's in your iPod to any PC, without needing to go through iTunes. It keeps all the tags, too, including comments.

Edited October 30, 2006 by Tom Storer

[John L]

Thanks for that tip, John. One question: if your MP3s are not all in the iTunes Library folder to begin with, what does the "organize my music" operation do with them:

- move them to iTunes Library folder (so they're no longer where they used to be)

- move a copy of them to the iTunes Library folder

- leave them where they are

?

I don't know, Tom. That is not something that I have ever tried.

I keep my iTunes folder in my 500GB hard drive (As you probably know, you can choose where you want your iTunes folder in "preferences: advanced." There you can also choose an option to have iTunes either draw on files from multiple sources, or have iTunes make an automatic copy of everything that you load to the (active) iTunes folder. I just keep everything in one place. So I don't need to have files in multiple sources.

I back up my iTunes MP3s on another 500GB hard drive. That is not an extremely cheap option, but I already have over 300GB ripped or downloaded that I don't want to lose.

Here is something interesting that I discovered: If you make an external hard drive your default iTunes drive and don't hook it up to your computer when you boot, the computer will default to the computer's hard drive as a new temporary iTunes default. So I take more portable computer, rip files in the States, and then bring them back to Russia on my computer's hard drive. I then move the MP3s to my hard drive and iTunes autonomatically recognizes their new home.

John

[Deuterium]

Like John, I use two external hardrives. I import directly to one, and keep a copy of my library on the other. Although this isn't a cheap solution, it is more convenient for me than other options. I also save each tune in two different formats, a lossy and a lossless version. The lossy version (320) gets moved to my iPOD and the lossless version is used as a source for my Head Fi rig.

[John L]

Ripping alternatives to lossless sounds smart. Then CDs really do begin to become almost obsolete. My collection is large enough that I will need to wait for the next generation capacity equipment for that.

[Deuterium]

I am able to fit my library on a 250g HD. Of course, I hope to exceed its capacity in the future.

[md655321]

Thanks for that tip, John. One question: if your MP3s are not all in the iTunes Library folder to begin with, what does the "organize my music" operation do with them:

- move them to iTunes Library folder (so they're no longer where they used to be)

- move a copy of them to the iTunes Library folder

- leave them where they are

?

None of these. It RENAMES the files according to what itunes thinks they should be. Meaning, if you add something that isnt well names, it will automatically put it in as Uknown Artist - Uknown Album. You must be very careful. The one great thing about it though is that if you change the artist name or genre or whatever within itunes, it stays changed if you take it out of the library, and then re-add it. If you dont have it set to organized, the file will revert to its preitunes tags once it is taken out of the library.

Hope that made sense.

[John L]

In order to get your MP3 files in iTunes in really good order, there is one rather tedious operation that needs to be done. iTunes creates individual folders for artists and a single folder that holds all "compilations." The idea is that a compilation is a CD with multiple artists (as opposed to a collected works CD of a single artist.) But this is all muddled in the CDDB database. Sometimes it almost seems as if "compliation" is attached to CDs on a random basis in the CDDB. If you rip a CD of a single artist and CDDB labels it a compilation, iTunes won't file it in the artist folder, but in the compilations folder with no artist designation. Similarly, if you rip a multiple artist compilation that is not designated a compilation in CDDB, iTunes will scatter the MP3s into multiple artist folders, as opposed to creating a single folder for the album.

Therefore, I look at all my new iTunes folders and then make corrections to the "compilation" designation through iTunes editing (get info function). An even easier option is to check, and change if necessary, the designation before you rip.

Edited October 31, 2006 by John L

[Tom Storer]

Just out of curiosity, at what bitrate do you rip your MP3s?

[Deuterium]

John,

Thanks for posting this tip on compilations. The only problem I have had with iTunes is this issue with compilations. I now know how to fix it. Thanks.

[Deuterium]

Just out of curiosity, at what bitrate do you rip your MP3s?

320 for lossy, and ALAC for lossless.

[jmjk]

I'm pretty clueless when it comes to this stuff, but...

If I place a song in multiple Playlists, does it take up multiple bits of memory? For instance, if I have a 5kb track in Playlist A and again in Playlist B, am I using 10kb of space on my iPod?

[tonym]

I'm pretty clueless when it comes to this stuff, but...

If I place a song in multiple Playlists, does it take up multiple bits of memory? For instance, if I have a 5kb track in Playlist A and again in Playlist B, am I using 10kb of space on my iPod?

i'm sure it just reads the file on your drive so it should only be 5kb in your example. However, there might be extra memory usage for 'labelling' and the like.

When I've created very long playlists for journeys in the car, it doesn't add great amounts to the disc usage, but there is some increase.

[jmjk]

I'm pretty clueless when it comes to this stuff, but...

If I place a song in multiple Playlists, does it take up multiple bits of memory? For instance, if I have a 5kb track in Playlist A and again in Playlist B, am I using 10kb of space on my iPod?

i'm sure it just reads the file on your drive so it should only be 5kb in your example. However, there might be extra memory usage for 'labelling' and the like.

When I've created very long playlists for journeys in the car, it doesn't add great amounts to the disc usage, but there is some increase.

Thanks, tonym. I just did an experiment with 1.5 GB of duplicates in two playlists, and it didn't make much difference, as you say.

Edited January 5, 2007 by jmjk

[mjzee]

For a while now, I've suspected that the "random" feature on my iPod wasn't really random. Why did it seem to play the same songs again and again, when my collection is pretty large? It would frustrate me that I wouldn't be hearing the new albums I've downloaded from eMusic.

It seems to me that when iTunes selects a subset of songs to sync to the iPod, it follows some rules. The one I noticed is that it syncs entire albums, not, say, 4 songs from a 12-song album. I suspect there are other such rules programmed into the logic. But I've found a workaround to create a true® random selection:

First, I create a Smart Playlist, selecting at random 13 GB (I own a 15-GB iPod). Then, within iTunes, I specify that the iPod should sync to only this playlist. Voila! I'm hearing songs I haven't previously heard. If the songlist start to get stale, I'll just repeat the process.

I just wanted to share.

[.:.impossible]

Another good random trick is to sort by time in itunes, then select a range and upload to the ipod. 4:13 minute tracks through 10:04 minute tracks, for instance. Hit 'shuffle songs' on the ipod if you like.

Hours of ifun.

[Harold_Z]

For a while now, I've suspected that the "random" feature on my iPod wasn't really random. Why did it seem to play the same songs again and again, when my collection is pretty large? It would frustrate me that I wouldn't be hearing the new albums I've downloaded from eMusic.

It seems to me that when iTunes selects a subset of songs to sync to the iPod, it follows some rules. The one I noticed is that it syncs entire albums, not, say, 4 songs from a 12-song album. I suspect there are other such rules programmed into the logic. But I've found a workaround to create a true® random selection:

First, I create a Smart Playlist, selecting at random 13 GB (I own a 15-GB iPod). Then, within iTunes, I specify that the iPod should sync to only this playlist. Voila! I'm hearing songs I haven't previously heard. If the songlist start to get stale, I'll just repeat the process.

I just wanted to share.

YEAH ! I've noticed the same thing. I'll give your "fix" a shot.

[rostasi]

For a while now, I've suspected that the "random" feature on my iPod wasn't really random.

Thanks for sharing this, but as a guy who's devoted his life to

randomness and statistics I can tell you that the iPod random feature

is as close to random as can be without using physics or astronomical methods.

The fact that you hear the same songs often is randomness.

The two alternative methods mentioned are good because they give the illusion

of complete chaos, but will still produce the same type of results -

only they'll be restricted to an area that you won't easily notice.

In the second suggestion, that would be time.

If you were as keen to time as you are to the sound of an artist,

then you could later say, "Hey! My iPod keeps playing tunes that are between

4 and 5 minutes long" or some other mean time span.

It's a common mis-perception about randomness.

There's also a tendency for randomness to favor the middle areas.

Artists on the alphabet fringes may not appear as often.

For example, you can have Monk show up more often than Adderley or Zorn

even if you have half as much Monk on your iPod.