iTunes / mp3 Tags

Does anyone know how iTunes determines which albums it puts in the compilations file and then drops at the back of your cover flow after the a-z has run through.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which albums it decides are compilations. I've checked all the mp3 tags and none of them look funny.

It's really bugging me and I want them all in OCD order.

Anyone have any idea how to do this?

Thanks in advance.

It uses a custom tag that extends the ID3 tag. So you won't be able to see or edit that tag through most tag editors or viewers.

As to how it defines what is a compilation, it's either going to be one or more of these three methods:
1) It looks up the info in iTunes to decide whether it's a compilation.
2) It just compares all of the Artist fields on all tracks of Albums of the same name.
3) It does a proper lookup against something like MusicBrainz.

I doubt it does #3 because Apple don't really work with other entities. So I suspect it's the first two, which will inevitably include false positives occasionally.

This is the proprietary tag:
http://www.id3.org/iTunes_Compilation_Flag

TCP = 1 if it's a compilation.

How do I fix it?

go into itunes, select all the tracks in the album, do a 'get info' on them, and there's an option in one of the tabs with a check box for 'compilation'.

This is the proprietary tag:
http://www.id3.org/iTunes_Compilation_Flag

TCP = 1 if it's a compilation.

Muchos Gratis. Found a tag editor that lets you edit the extended tags. I'll be OCDing my collection later on.

metatags: the 21st century equivalent of alphabetising your record collection.

You would not believe how bad I am at this.

Shit, I have a tool that determines the BPM to 3 decimal places and also saves a BPM map of the track. This is on top of using MusicBrainz and other stuff. I'm a little religious about how I store my library.

when you have a big music library it's fucking necessary to be anal about it.

How do I fix it?

unistall iTunes and use Winamp...

Winamp rules the roost as far as I'm concerned in music players. *
It's *faster, and easier to use and is just better, and u can use it to transfer songs to iPod.

unistall iTunes and use Winamp...

Winamp rules the roost as far as I'm concerned in music players. *
It's *faster, and easier to use and is just better, and u can use it to transfer songs to iPod.

Minus the artwork for all of the iTunes views. But hey, for all of the other gains, it's worth it.

You would not believe how bad I am at this.

Shit, I have a tool that determines the BPM to 3 decimal places and also saves a BPM map of the track. This is on top of using MusicBrainz and other stuff. I'm a little religious about how I store my library.

I have a friend who recently admitted to the following. On his old Amiga 500 (or whatever they were called), when he installed a new game he would find the install folder and manually rename all of the files in it (often about 300) so that they had an initial capital letter, followed by lower case.

Unbelievable.

Minus the artwork for all of the iTunes views. But hey, for all of the other gains, it's worth it.

you use winamp too ?
i really tried using Media-player and iTunes, but they takes ages to sort stuff out.
you can get add-ons for whatever you want really with Winamp, or if you not happy, make one up yourself.

You get all the artwork with Winamp too.

all of my anally-retentive tagging-nazi friends swear by Foobar2000. i think they like the customisation or something, and apparently it handles tags very well. good codec support as well.

no mac version though, so i'm SOL.

I use Foobar on my laptop.

But my home system is a Squeezebox setup if it's just background listening. Winamp for foreground listening.

I owned an iPod, twice... but the first time is failed after 3 months and when replaced with a new one that failed after 6 months. I just gave up.

I'm sans-mp3 player at the moment as my last one was smashed at the LFGSS Christmas Party. But I hope to get a little Cowon thing next: http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/MP3_Players.1/Cowon_iAudio.15/IAUDIOD216GBDAB/Cowon_iAudio_D2_16GB_MP3_Player_with_DAB_Digital_Radio.3337.html?amp3sid=n1vh8vjaf3johg7lvmjlbutqo6

May be a while off though. My dentist visit this morning has left me sans money.

Know the feeling...
Thieving, smug, clever people with their friendly, overly-correct, white-tooth smiles.
Yeah... i'd be smiling too if I charged 300 pounds an hour!

ironically a dentist in the past i once used had bad breath and crocked teeth.
Never went back the second time.

my home system is a Squeezebox setup if it's just background listening.

do you like the squeezebox? i'd be interested partly for professional reasons, partly because i've been looking at getting something like that. how well does it handle large music libraries? what codecs does it play? how's the quality?

I love it.

However there is a catch to it... you've got to leave a file server turned on, the SqueezeBox only plays files it doesn't host them.

It plays Flac, Ogg, Mp3, etc. It won't be able to play iTunes DRM files, but can play their DRM-free stuff.

It's hooked up to the stereo in my living room and the sound is pretty good. Of course it's dependent on the source files, but the Flacs I have reveal very good sound from the box, not quite on a par with the studio sound card in the desktop, but pretty damn good.

Collection size I have is 57,000 songs, covering around 450GB of disk space in various formats, but mostly I've been ripping in MP3 Lame V0 or Flac.

The responsiveness of the entire system is related to the speed of the file server... so I recently upgraded that and now the whole thing flies along. When I was using an IcyBox NAS for storage it would take 3 hours to scan the whole collection, and now I'm using RAID 10 on a Windows Server 2008 box it takes around 12 minutes. So the file server is pretty damn important in terms of how it handles a large collection.

The other primary use case I have is remote access. I travel for work (nowhere near as much as you do though) and it's liberating to be in Seattle and play the music I want, from the UK. You can fine tune the streaming compression, I leave mine around 192kbps most of the time, but if I'm feeling fussy I can boost it up.

You can also listen remotely at the same time that someone is listening locally. And you can see what they're listening to, and vice versa.

I think it's cool. It does everything I want and I'm a happy shopper. The only thing to bear in mind is the file server... it needs to be turned on, and for performance you'll want a good set of disks on a motherboard with a good bus.

awesome, thanks for that. i'm looking at the version with built-in speakers as a bedroom stereo.

definitely gives me something to think about.