Smart Playlists.com

Ripping DVDs

You may have a source of music you weren't aware of: DVDs. A full-length audio track from a DVD may not be desirable, but the extra tracks from a bonus DVD are perfect.

Case in Point: Simply Red's Home. The bonus DVD has four tracks, two excerpts from a full-length live DVD and two non-album tracks.

Use an application to rip the audio from the DVD. I use and recommend Audio Hijack for the Mac from Rogue Amoeba Software. You should rip to AIFF to get the best quality. If you click record just before you select a track from the DVD menu, then stop recording after, you'll get individual tracks instead of a long stream.

Drag all the AIFF tracks into iTunes, tag them, then rip to AAC or preferred file format. Keep the AIFFs somewhere outside your library as you may need to re-rip them at a later stage.

The procedure above is highly simplified but is intended to demonstrate that it can be done fairly simply. There are often DVD tracks well worth listening to as audio tracks.

by japester on Feb 18 | 8:00 am

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Compilation Checkbox

Friends of mine have mentioned that they have been confused by the Compilation checkbox in the song info dialog. Here's the result of my experiment into what it actually does.

There are essentially two types of compilation: a collection of songs from different artists or a collection of songs from a greater body of work by the same artist.

The Compilation tag is useful in smart playlists. You can find all songs from compilation albums by searching for checked songs.

The Compilation tag appears to primarily serve a behind-the-scenes function. When you check the Compilation checkbox, iTunes reorganises all the songs with that tag into an album folder and puts the folder in a Compilations artist folder in your iTunes music folder. This means far less artist folders for what might be one or two songs each. The folder structure is more efficient and if you wanted to go looking for songs from the album, you could find them all in the Compilations folder.

That makes the Compilation tag very useful for the first type of compilation I mentioned above, but it's confusing when you use it for the one artist. You can look in your iTunes music folder and discover that you apparently are missing one or two albums for a particular artist, only to discover them in the Compilations folder.

Moral of the story? My advice is to only check the Compilation checkbox for those songs that come from an album containing multiple artists. If you want to listen to a compilation from the same artist, you can easily find it under the artist name in iTunes or the artist submenu on the iPod.

by japester on Feb 17 | 8:00 am

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Live Hour

I have a playlist that gives me an hour of live tracks.

I could search all song names for the word "live", but it's not foolproof. I prefer to use the keyword "live" in the comments tag.

Prepare your live music as follows: Create a smart playlist that looks for the word "live" in both song and album titles. Select all the tracks and get info. In the comments field, put the word "live". Click the Okay button. Go through your library looking for any albums you know are live but don't have word "live" in the song or album title. You could use a smart playlist that excludes all songs containing "live" to get a better view. Tag these songs as above.

Change your original smart playlist to look for the keyword "live" in the comments field. Specify an hour's worth and you've got yourself an hour of live versions.

by japester on Feb 16 | 8:00 am

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Soundtrack Genres

I organise my physical soundtrack CDs by name of the movie or TV show, and I keep them in a genre of "soundtrack", because the CDs as units make sense that way. I can find a physical CD easily because I know it was from the "Blah" movie.

However, this is not useful in iTunes, because a lot of the functionality of iTunes and the iPod comes from individualising tags. If I have a goth rock track from a soundtrack, with the genre "soundtrack", it won't come up in goth rock smart playlists unless I include the soundtrack genre. If you do that, you'll also get all the "Bambi", "Reservoir Dogs", "Star Wars", etc. songs. Where's the goth rock in that?

The solution: Treat each song individually. Tag each song with it's actual genre. Then add a keyword, "soundtrack" in the comments field. Now the goth rock songs from soundtracks _will_ come up in my goth rock playlist, and if you really want to look for soundtrack songs, use the keyword in the comments tag.

by japester on Feb 15 | 8:00 pm

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Keeping Your Music Folder Clean

It pays to poke around in your music folder from time to time to eliminate inconsistencies. Yesterday I had a look and found two folders for Jane's Addiction: "Jane's Addiction" and "Jane_s Addiction". I had a look in iTunes to confirm that there is one artist with that name.

Here's what I think happened. I ripped one CD with iTunes 4.1 and the other with 4.2. It seems that with 4.2, Apple changed the way the app names folders to make them more compatible with Windows. As far as I know, Windows is picky about certain characters in filenames, whereas Mac OS doesn't care unless it's a colon or slash. I've seen the use of the underscore in music folders on a PC in place of certain characters.

I didn't like there being two folders for the same artist in the music folder, so I selected all the songs from both albums and renamed the artist to "Janes Addiction". Then I renamed it again, this time with the apostrophe. When I looked in my music folder again, both albums had been combined into the artist folder "Jane_s Addiction".

I didn't want to risk confusing iTunes, so I didn't alter the folder structure directly.

by japester on Feb 07 | 7:00 am

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	thenightfly42: Similarly to genEric, I use the albumname ZS for my singles, which puts them at the end of the list. ... Feb 17 \| 12:14 pm ratch333: if i have a playlist and i want to resort the tracklist, how do i do that (i.e. i want ... Feb 16 \| 10:58 pm genEric: I used to also have all my non-album tracks have a completely blank album field. This then posed a ... Feb 16 \| 6:21 pm healy: Suggest the max songs per artist idea to apple: http://www if enough people say something about it.. ... Feb 15, 05 \| 6:42 pm Scott: This is brilliant - - thanks! Provides a welcome, "random" alternative to Smart Playlists that are somewhat predictable due ... Feb 15 \| 10:39 am ratch333: hi when u create a playlist from your ipod, its very simple. but what do i do when i want to ... Feb 15, 05 \| 10:34 am Seuss: Just add "live" to the tracks comment section in the tags. Then create a new smartplaylist where comment contains "live" ... Feb 14, 05 \| 5:03 pm

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