Month: September 2006

New to iTunes 7: Album Artist and other features

In addition to all the hullabaloo about the new iTunes 7, here are the minor enhancements and changes I noticed while exploring.

Album Artist

There’s a new music tag called “album artist.” I’m not sure what it’s used for yet, but it could be for compatibility with windows media files. UPDATE: From glancing around the interweb it seems as though album artist is in fact used by wma files, but i think iTunes 7 still doesn’t play them (i don’t have one to test). within iTunes, however, it looks like the tag is most useful for when a song has a guest artist in addition to the main artist, like Basement Jaxx featuring J.C. Chasez. Under the iTunes 6 scheme, I had been putting that info in the comment field. I’ll let you know how it works, when I try this method.

It could also be useful for classical music in situations where a soloist or vocal is featured in addition to the orchestra. On that note, please allow me to plug my classical music tagging article, which was written for iTunes 6, but still applies today because of the iPod’s shortcomings.

From Apple’s support page:

iTunes 7 includes a new attribute for song files called Album Artist This allows you to assign a primary artist name for an album that many includes songs by several artists. It is important that all songs in the album have the same Album Artist name. To assign an Album Artist, select all the songs in the album and choose Get Info from the File menu. Next, type a name in the Album Artist field name such that it will apply to all the selected songs. This field can optionally be left blank if all the songs have the same album name.

Album Artist is not respected by the iPod, however, at least not iPod Software 1.2. Songs continue to be sorted by the Artist tag alone, which of course makes the new tag almost useless. I say, “almost” because I did find one use for it. Also, I have additional criticism of the Album Artist tag with regards to the iPod.

iTunes album artist

 

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New Album Sorting Options

The album column in list view also sports new sorting options. Click on the Album header. It’ll switch between Album, Album by Artist (each artist’s album sorted alphabetically), and Album by Year (each artist’s album sorted chronologically). Click the triangle to reverse the sorting order.

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Gapless and Crossfade

And it looks like you have to tell iTunes that your songs are gapless. If you’re using Crossfade playback, click “Part of a gapless album” to keep seamless songs together. Look under the song options. Thanks Brian!

 

iTunes gapless playback

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New batch operations in iTunes 7:

iTunes 7 batch

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Multiple Libraries

Hold down option (or alt) when opening iTunes to choose from multiple libraries. You can also create a new library from scratch and save it in a new location. iTunes will use this library as its default until another is selection using this same method.

iTunes 7 multiple libraries

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New Smart Playlist Selectors

iTunes 7 smart playlists
Then there’s some new smart playlist criteria, including the afore-mentioned album artist, as well as the brand new last skipped and skip count.

Syncing Problems

Also, iTunes now lists all the problems it has syncing files with an iPod.

iTunes 7 ipod errors

In the Minority Report: Disappointment

Minority Report, the 2002 film and it’s accompanying score, are both somewhat disappointing. The normally spirited chemistry between Señor Spielbergo and his personal maestro, Johnny William-san, turns into a cinematic and orchestral mush.

Yeah, like the film, it’s dark and complex and quite technically proficient. But it lacks that certain gravitas that one expects from a Williams’ score.

This is surprising; the dystopian-future themes and settings of the previous year’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence would seem to lend themselves to further musical exploration. Yet, the score to A.I. is one of Williams’ all-time masterpieces while Minority Report is rather forgettable. It’s further surprising considering that the new-millennium has been a new golden age for the composer.

In the end though, I’ve had Minority Report for four years and I’m still struggling to appreciate it. Thus, i’m disappointed to say that this is one score that will soon be leaving my library.

Finding Statistics About Your iTunes Library

iTunes logo with graph

Anyone who has been reading the tunequest for a while knows that statistics, numbers, figures and graphs have played a large part in its progress. In fact, it was the discovery that 10% of my songs were responsible for 49% of my total play counts that prompted me to set out on this endeavor in the first place.

To this day, I’m still surprised by the lack of sophisticated options available for gathering and analyzing iTunes’ stored data. That XML file has been a statistical treasure trove since the day it started recording star ratings and play counts. You’d think that in the four years since, there would be a more mature market of programs to choose from.

However, 2006 has actually seen some positive developments in that regard. While there is still no killer app for iTunes stats, there are a number of solutions for parsing your XML file and learning more about your music, and yourself.

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