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The tricky thing about fanmixes
Sep. 19th, 2010 10:19 pmI love fanmixes. It's a fun way of telling a story, exploring a pairing, sharing your love for a fandom, and for discovering new music.
Alas, it's kind of a pain to organize said music, especially since everyone has their own methods. I tend to go with the flow--if stuff's already tagged/labeled and has the artwork attached, yay. If not, I'll add the bare minimum of what I care about and move on.
Here's where I run into trouble:
* If there's no genre and I don't know the artist, what do I do? You can pretty much create your own genres, and "Fanmix" is a valid genre in iTunes. Of course it doesn't say anything about the artist or the track itself.
* If a song is on two fanmixes, you can have multiple album artwork images embedded into the one song, but only one will display unless you switch it. It's easier to a) just have two of the same song or b) just not care about the artwork and swap it when you feel like it (if you remember). But the problem is, what if it's two fanmixes where the rest of the album information is intact? Marking it as a "Compilation" is technically inaccurate, since that term implies that there are various artists on a single ALBUM. The "Compilation" indicator has nothing to do with "Grouping," for example, which is what I use for fanmix tracks that already have the album information in there. So do I mark it as a NOT compilation, since iTunes' organizational method won't properly group everything from the Playlist/Grouping under one folder, anyway?
Right now I'm using the awesome (although somewhat unpretty) app "beaTunes 2" to help with my iTunes organizational woes. It inspects my iTunes library (which, by the way, is pretty darn huge) and looks up inconsistencies of all sorts, ranging from typos (REM versus R.E.M.) to those pesky Compilation tags on tracks with only one "Album" artist (Note: Not "Album Artist," but an "Artist" on one "Album").
It's not perfect; it thinks any and all albums called "Christmas Songs" are the same album, even if it's by multiple artists--as if it's a compilation album when it's not. It's just a million people have released "Christmas Songs" albums. Let's get creative here people, shall we?! Well, in the meantime, I can tell beaTunes 2 to ignore that.
But what do you do for organizing your fanmixes? How would you solve the above issues?
Alas, it's kind of a pain to organize said music, especially since everyone has their own methods. I tend to go with the flow--if stuff's already tagged/labeled and has the artwork attached, yay. If not, I'll add the bare minimum of what I care about and move on.
Here's where I run into trouble:
* If there's no genre and I don't know the artist, what do I do? You can pretty much create your own genres, and "Fanmix" is a valid genre in iTunes. Of course it doesn't say anything about the artist or the track itself.
* If a song is on two fanmixes, you can have multiple album artwork images embedded into the one song, but only one will display unless you switch it. It's easier to a) just have two of the same song or b) just not care about the artwork and swap it when you feel like it (if you remember). But the problem is, what if it's two fanmixes where the rest of the album information is intact? Marking it as a "Compilation" is technically inaccurate, since that term implies that there are various artists on a single ALBUM. The "Compilation" indicator has nothing to do with "Grouping," for example, which is what I use for fanmix tracks that already have the album information in there. So do I mark it as a NOT compilation, since iTunes' organizational method won't properly group everything from the Playlist/Grouping under one folder, anyway?
Right now I'm using the awesome (although somewhat unpretty) app "beaTunes 2" to help with my iTunes organizational woes. It inspects my iTunes library (which, by the way, is pretty darn huge) and looks up inconsistencies of all sorts, ranging from typos (REM versus R.E.M.) to those pesky Compilation tags on tracks with only one "Album" artist (Note: Not "Album Artist," but an "Artist" on one "Album").
It's not perfect; it thinks any and all albums called "Christmas Songs" are the same album, even if it's by multiple artists--as if it's a compilation album when it's not. It's just a million people have released "Christmas Songs" albums. Let's get creative here people, shall we?! Well, in the meantime, I can tell beaTunes 2 to ignore that.
But what do you do for organizing your fanmixes? How would you solve the above issues?
