iPod display of artists from various-artists albums

2010-12-23 18:49:41

I have an iPod Classic with rips from my CD collection.  I have each CD archived as a single flac file with a cue sheet.  I use foobar to encode single tracks for transfer to my iPod Classic.  With the iPod, I like to view by a genre, then artists.  The problem is that I have various-artists CDs which "pollute" my iPod artists view.  When I'm looking at the artists, I don't want to see those that only have a single track from a various-artists CD.  This creates a problem for scrolling through artists from my car stereo head unit, which controls the iPod.

Is there a way to set up the iPod or the tags of the encoded files to solve my problem?  Note that my cue sheets for various-artists CDs have PERFORMER "Various" toward the top and PERFORMER "<performer of this track>" under each track.  I can think of several options to improve things.

1) Set the tagging options for various-artist CDs to combine the album artist (or just the word, "Various") with the track artist, and use this combination as the artist in the tags.  This would move all of the Various artists to the bottom of the list.  I could also implement this by brute force by adding "Various" to the track performer fields in my cue sheets.

2) I could change the genre of those various-artist CDs.

3) I could use genre -> album view w/ artist names added to the beginning of each album name.

These are not ideal solutions.  Can anyone recommend something else?

iPod display of artists from various-artists albums

Reply #1 – 2010-12-23 19:16:40

Change the compilation setting on your iPod to "on". As long as all of your albums with various artists are set as compilations, they will now be gone from your list of artists and will be found under compilations instead.

iPod display of artists from various-artists albums

Reply #2 – 2010-12-23 19:29:21

Awesome.  I had no idea there was such a feature.  Thanks, SmashCan.

iPod display of artists from various-artists albums

Reply #3 – 2010-12-23 19:53:12

For some reason the iPod hasn't caught up with iTunes, which allows viewing by "Album Artist", which avoids the "artists explosion" that ruins browsing. I don't like the "Compilations" feature, so I do the following to avoid polluting album artists with track artists. If track artists are present, I either append them (in parens) to the track name or copy them to the comment field using appropriate "actions" in Mp3tag. Then I copy the album artist to the track artist, so that those fields are the same. For classical music, album and track artist are the composer, e.g. "Mozart". For soundtracks, I use "Soundtracks" for album and track artist. For musicals whose composers aren't very prolific and not household words to me (e.g. NOT Sondheim), I use "Musicals" for the album and track artist. I only bother populating other information fields like "Composer" for the ones that I want to be able to browse by. When I did this, I went from an unbrowsable 3000+ composers to around 50, and over 1000 "Artists" to less than 500, all of which I've heard of. I haven't ended up with 200 albums jumbled in under "Various Artists" or Compilations. I've found this approach allows me to browse by "Artist" on my iPod Touch in what I consider a sane way. When I browse by "Genre", for things like "Musicals", I initially see the prominent composers plus the fake artist "Musicals" as the artists, and when I tap on them, I get the album list for the artist. So there's at most one extra tap when browsing by genre. I can also undo the track artist transformation if Apple ever brings the "Album Artist" view to the iPod. For the most part, I haven't discarded information, just moved it to different tags.