itunes/ipod management of mp3 blog songs

use one playlist function

I am always sure if I have a whole album by someone or just a track from a blog or download. If i stopped being sure I think that would be the point at which I had too much music.

(even the albums I do have on there, I've often deleted tracks I don't like, so a 'browse complete albums only' option on my iPod wouldn't be much use to me)

delete the album names for single tracks as you add them. easy.

As pete says, you could do what you want to do in iTunes with the playlist function (either by adding all your mp3 blog tracks to one or more playlists and then making a smart playlist that excludes tracks in that/those playlist(s), or by just making one playlist with all your complete albums in).

But that would only really work in iTunes itself, not on your iPod, where you'd just end up with just a playlist of all the tracks on complete albums (you can't browse album titles within playlists on the iPod interface in the way you can with iTunes).

So yeah, fsharp's suggestion is best.

fsharp's suggestion is ok, but I've never found "too much information" to be a problem (pardon the Police song pun).
Let's take fluxblog as an example- every mp3 you d/l from them has the word "fluxblog" in the comments field (or, at least every mp3 i've gotten from them does). Make a smart playlist with this variable:
comment contains fluxblog
and you'll have a constantly updated list w/ every fluxblog mp3 you import.
Rather than browsing by album, I think this is much more elegant-and once you set up the smartlist, you don't need to do any additional work.

I was thinking recently that I should make the site more iPod friendly and put "Fluxblog February 2005" (or whatever month/year, obvs) as the album for every mp3, but that would be annoying for my own organization of mp3s on my harddrive cos I'd have to switch everything back and forth, and I like to keep the album name info there for people.

I've been putting FLUXBLOG in the comments field for every mp3 in the past month or two.

It's a tricky one. What I do is cut/paste the album title into the comments (for future reference), then enter the blog name as the album title. This only holds true for the handful of MP3 blogs which I follow regularly; the rest are given an album title of "Misc 05".

I also keep a "New This Month" playlist on the go, and drag/drop new tracks into that.

I was thinking recently that I should make the site more iPod friendly and put "Fluxblog February 2005" (or whatever month/year, obvs) as the album for every mp3
Matt, can you instead put that in the comments area, perhaps like this?:
Fluxblog February 2005;
Some programs (like J River Media Center) use the semicolon to parse the comments field- even though I use Itunes, I liked the idea. It's great for smartlists, I fill up the comments area with info like indie;90s;pop;funk etcetera, and then make smartlists to pick out certain things.
Fluxblog's cool, by the way- I just don't remember to get over there enough.
x-post

mike t-diva:
You can get a smartlist to do that automatically for you, too- just set up a smartlist like this (I'm at work, so this from my memory):
Date Imported is in the last thirty days
or something like that.

The reason I don't think it's smart to go messing around w/ the album titles is that I'm now going back to files I changed/deleted the album name for mix purposes, and it's a pain to put the right info back in. On some, I had burned mix cd's of individual songs, then went and deleted the mp3s off my hard drive to conserve space (these were songs I got from 3wk and similar, free internet downloads & stuff).
Now, I end up ripping the mix cd to get those songs back, and have to search high, low, and AMG to find out the info.
Point is this- make your changes to a field like comments instead of album title.

I hate it when bloggers put the name of their blog in the album field. I use that field for album if anything (whether or not I have the whole thing). Please put it in the notes field if you have to put it anywhere.

The reason I thought fsharp's idea was best was that Mr Monket didn't seem so interested in looking at all his single mp3s from weblogs - it was more the other way around: that he didn't want these cluttering up his 'Browse Albums' feature.

deleting the album field seconded. i'll copy that info into the comments field so that it is not lost.

i approve of mp3blogs putting some info in the comments field and I've used a smart playlist looking for the word blog in the comments to assemble tracks from the blog world. i find i am now using del.icio.us to keep track of music I am introduced to.

I use a script called m3ucast, which automatically downloads the mp3s from mp3blogs and adds them to playlists for the respective sites. It works pretty well -- I can listen to the mp3s on the train, and then read about the songs when I get into the office. It doesn't help with the album issue -- or the fact that some sites do a crappy job of tagging files -- but it's the best solution I've found.

gspm- how are you using del.icio.us to keep track of music?

Here are some more suggestions, Monket.

xpost - i've just started recently, when i see i track i want to check out I find the permalink for the posting and post it to del.icio.us using the firefox delicious extension. I tag it as mp3blog + music + maybe a tag for some mp3blogs I keep returning to. I might write a bit about what attracted me to it. so then when I have a collection of tracks to add to the itunes library I can return to the postings to grab any additional info from the mp3blog that I might want to add to the comments of the file. witness ici.

can someone instruct me on how to use the m3ucast program posted above?

jsg, I just followed the instructions in the archive, and used CronniX to configure the cron settings. I am years past my smart computer period, but it's worked okay for me.

Thanks for the suggesstions.

i have one more suggestion to add as well which i think works quite well.

i put all my blog mp3s into a blog playlist on my itunes.
then sync that with the ipod.
Then on the ipod highlight all those tracks in the blog playlist and change the album name to "Blogs" and Compilation=yes.

now when i browse albums they dont clutter up the list and the album tag is preserved on itunes.

m3ucast looks interesting i'll check it out

itunes generally has lots of organizational depth and certainly its laid out better than anything i've seen - at the same time i wonder if whats needed to properly address all of these issues once and for all is just straight up database software thats fully configurable on the level of access or whatever - seems like a shame to be locked in to having to choose which field to use for what when the software could simply be adjusted accordingly - open source itunes, anyone? for instance, the group compilation feature only works with tracks that all have the same album field value - lame - i mean even if you have a soundtrack it'd be nice to have the album the song came from originally - i dont know - maybe this isnt the right forum for this, but i thought i'd throw these thoughts into the mix - i dont mean to offend anyone if this is already sorta common knowledge and its just a matter of figuring out how to make what we got (itunes) work as good as it can, which at the end of the day, for me anyway, is gonna be what happens, at least until someone makes something better - god knows it aint gonna be me - i've spent too much time on the post as it is

New version of iTunes - 4.9 - is released and will handle podcasts.

Hey, this is probably as good a place to ask as any - are there any other things people think I should be doing with the tags of the mp3s I post to make their lives easier with their equipment? Right now I've got it so that the comments read FLUXBLOG (month) (year), and I make sure to include the album art. Just curious, if it's reasonable, I'll do it.

If you put 'Fluxblog' as the album, couldn't iTunes make a playlist out of all the songs you've posted? Or would that work out of the comment field as well?

(I hate mp3blogs that do that.)

You could set up a Smart Playlist, with comments starting with "Fluxblog", or comments equal to "Fluxblog June 05" etc.

I always change the album title on my Fluxblog MP3s to "Fluxblog 05", but that's because I have a personal preference for avoiding standalone album titles. I sometimes cut & paste the album title into the comments, though.

The "year" field is important, as I have a "2005" smart playlist, and a "recently added in 2005" smart playlist. But Matthew's good like that already.

However... and there's no doubt a screamingly obvious answer to this... why do most MP3 bloggers add underscores between the words in the file names? It's *slightly* annoying, as I'd rather have a more easily legible file name, with embedded spaces, and I've never known a machine which couldn't handle that...

Mike - I don't know about "most MP3 bloggers" but Said the Gramophone (and presumably Fluxblog) do that because of strange requirements for hosted files at .Mac accounts. Filenames have to be quite short, and can't take spaces or most symbols.

I always thought that spaces in file names on servers could confuse linking in browsers depending on how it's done.

http://www.mymp3blog.com/coldplay - this song rips off our last one.mp3
(might end up as just http://www.mymp3blog.com/coldplay)

vs

http://www.mymp3blog.com/coldplay_-_this_song_rips_off_our_last_one.mp3

etc.

No, I keep the album field for the name of the album/EP/single.

I could actually be more consistent with the year field, I'll keep that in mind.

I include the single underscore between the band and the song name for two reasons - a lot of Macs flip out and won't download files that have spaces and punctuation in the title, and keeping with that, I separate the names to keep it somewhat readable.

What makes me happy for mp3blog files is the correct year in the year field and the blog ID in the comments field.

Somewhat like Mike, I typically erase the album field or move that info into the comment field because when I have albums listed in the library (itunes) that only have orphan songs it just clogs my library with incomplete albums. i like the albums list to be an accurate reflection of what full albums are in the library.

I put "blog" in the "group" field. Actually, I put all sorts of things in the group field, like month added, and other things. Then, I can organize smart playlists, like "Group /contains/ 'blog'", or "Group /contains/ '0605'". That way I can keep the actual album titles intact, and also the comments field, since lots of audioblogs, like fluxblog, put things there. I've got way too much music to expect to be able to just scroll through album titles for things.

My Fluxblog Smart Playlist is as follows:
Comment contains fluxblog
Date Imported is in the last 7 days.
Just to keep it fresh.....