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Using the Compilation Tag to Reduce the Number of Artists

Now and again you'll get an album by a principal artist, but with one or two tracks by other artists. It's not strictly a compilation, because these secondary artists aren't contributing many songs.

The problem became most apparent when producing HTML catalogs using iTunes Catalog. These secondary artists add unnecessarily to the total artist count and appear at random throughout the catalog.

Case in point: The Rolling Stones' Still Life. This album begins with a track by Duke Ellington and is ended by Jimi Hendrix. It's quite clearly a Stones album, but you can't tag the above two tracks with the Stones as the artist.

Solution: If you select the secondary artists' tracks and get info, then set the Compilation tag to "Yes", they will disappear into the Compilations folder in your Music folder. In this case, the album is still in the Rolling Stones folder, and in iTunes Catalog, the other two tracks become listed under the album name, not the individual artists.

by japester on Mar 09 | 8:00 pm

[0] Trackbacks

A caveat to this: if you browse to this album on your iPod by
Browse > Artists > Rolling Stones > Still Life
, you would not hear the Hendrix or Ellington tracks. For this, you would need to do
Browse > Albums > Still Life

by thenightfly42 on Mar 10 | 7:53 am

I can't believe I hadn't thought of this before. Great idea!

by hondo77 on Mar 10 | 12:13 pm

Thanks for this. Your and another post about using the compilation feature have helped me a lot. I've looked through two published books on iTunes and neither one of them discusses the use of the compilation feature.

by Bakari on Mar 10 | 1:23 pm

Hey kids! Anyone know whether I can increase the volume of a whole album in one swoop or whether each track has to be turned up individually???

by pusscahh on Mar 18 | 4:10 pm

pusscahh, your post really should be a new one. It's got nothing to do with the conversation. Use the Contribute button at the top of the page to start a new conversation.

by japester on Mar 19 | 4:02 pm

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