Comments on: Order Out of Nothingness: Tagging 101

By: Robert Stribley

Robert Stribley — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:05:00 +0000

Mindtron: Yes, another good point. Of course, it’s even messier when the same track is different lengths on different albums, but that’s also a different issue, I suppose.

By: Robert Stribley

Robert Stribley — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:03:12 +0000

Thanks for the thought, Mikko. Are you referring to using the album artist field, as distinct from the artist field? If so, it’s a good point, though I guess my response would be that iTunes doesn’t present it to users as a default. Either way, I think the principle of tagging (the right) key fields consistently remains the point. Besides,

You may, however, have also just highlighted a usability issue with iTunes!

By: Mikko

Mikko — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:04:44 +0000

2. Learn how to use artist/album artist and sorting. ;)

By: mindtron

mindtron — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:28:31 +0000

another benefit to tagging in itunes would be the ability to apply a song to multiple albums at the same time.

if the same version of a song is on a compilation or soundtrack as an album, it would be nice to not have two copies in your library

By: Robert Stribley

Robert Stribley — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:30:08 +0000

You’re absolutely right, Johan. I select Get Info myself on a file to make updates. And there is a composer field there, which solves the above issue for those who are aware of it. Primarily, I meant to focus on the fields users typically see in iTunes and the impact of completing those.

Clinton, your point reminds me of another thing I often think about, which I didn’t include above: liner notes. Now, you actually can add lyrics, etc to an mp3, tho I see few artists doing that. But I also like the idea that I can see who played oboe on a particular track – or, what on earth was than instrument I heard on that track? … etc.

People often raise an eyebrow when I say I still buy CDs (in addition to a lot of mp3s), but it’s precisely for this rich, accompanying data, which I don’t get in a digital file. Yet.

By: Clinton Forry

Clinton Forry — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:05:37 +0000

Great post! iTunes may be the best real-world example when it comes to explaining the importance of metadata, and the impact it can have.

A colleague (a classical double-bass player) and I have had many discussions about the limitations of the iTunes tagging scheme. It is especially apparent in the world of classical music.

As you mentioned, a classical release often has more variables than most other music. These have all shown up in the artist field, without consistency via the iTunes connection with CDDB, the online database used to auto-populate the tags:
-orchestras
-soloists
-conductors
-composers

Things get more complicated when movements or “songs” are named things like “Adagio” or “Lento.” Sorting becomes all but impossible.

By: Johan Strandell

Johan Strandell — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:46:52 +0000

iTunes does have some additional sorting functions, but they’re fairly well hidden away.

If you use View Info on a track or album there’s a tab for Sorting. There you can override the actual artist, so you can for instance have classical music sorted by the composer instead of the performer by setting “Sort Artist” to the composer. This way, you still get the information about who performed it in iTunes.

It seems to work as expected for collaborations as well. (It seems to work with iPods as well, but I haven’t tested it extensively.)

But I agree that tagging would be a better solution.

By: Robert Stribley

Robert Stribley — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:02:55 +0000

Great example, Erik. It’s a common problem in the hip-hop and electronic genres, where an artist may have several different vocalists featured on a single album. You need the flexibility to describe that data – and the relationships among those data points even – accurately.

A similar issue exists with classical music, too: If Górecki is the composer and The Polish Radio Orchestra plays his symphony, which goes in the artist field?

By: Erik

Erik — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:23:28 +0000

Thanks for the great post. These are issues I’ve been unsuccessfully grappling with myself and I tend to wonder whether the entire schema should be reconfigured. As a hip-hop fan, cameos have pretty much ruined my ability to isolate individual artists short of searching on their name in the search box. It seems a field that can represent supporting artists would be helpful to isolate the full body of work of each artist without forcing the user to devise a query.