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[hansonizzer]

Guys

In MC11 compilations and soundtracks are displayed as multiple artists. When syncing to iPod, hundreds of artists with just one or two tracks appear on the ipod, which is very annoying to find the artist you want. In MC9 they were displayed as multiple artists as well on the iPod.

Is there a way to fix this?

H.

[tlongacre]

Not currently. Maybe v. 12? It is a known complaint, however.

[Galley]

Only the newest color iPods support the "compilation" feature.

[risingdamp]

Guys

In MC11 compilations and soundtracks are displayed as multiple artists. When syncing to iPod, hundreds of artists with just one or two tracks appear on the ipod, which is very annoying to find the artist you want. In MC9 they were displayed as multiple artists as well on the iPod.

Is there a way to fix this?

H.

I think the problem goes deeper than this for me.  I have a bunch of playlists on the iPod that are made up of various tracks from albums by the original artists.  So the Album Artist (auto) tag for these tracks will not be 'Multiple artists'; they will have the original artist name.  However, when I search through the Artist list on iPod I don't want to see them because I only have one or two tracks for that artist.  I only want to see the artist name listed on iPod if I've actually synched the whole album.

I can think of a few possible solutions to this:

1.  When synching playlists there could be an option for each playlist to include / exclude the tracks from the Artist list so you would only include it for the smartlist that has all your albums for loading to your iPod.  This could get complicated by the fact that some tracks will be in more than one list.

2.  This is a more manual solution.  Let the user specify a custom field instead of Artist (e.g. iPod Artist) so we could set this to blank for all tracks that are not part of a full album being synched.

2 above would work perfectly for me because all albums I transfer have a tag of iPod=Include whereas single tracks on other playlists do not have this tag.  So I could set the custom iPod Artist field to blank except where iPod=Include.

[SteveG]

More work will be done in this area in the future.

JLee,

Thanks for the clarification of the possible pitfalls.

[risingdamp]

No problem Steve.  In the meantime I'm using this manual workaround which works very nicely:

Pre-Sync:

1. Back up library
2. Change option: Don't update tags when file info changes
3. Set artist name to Various for all tracks where iPod <> 'Include' (i.e. track is only on iPod because it's in another compilation playlist of some sort).

Post-Sync:

1. Restore Library
2. Change option: Update tags when file info changes

Anyone that is really desperate for the Album Artist (Auto) feature to return or some other variation on this request can use a variation of the above workaround.  Just be very careful and only try it when sober as forgetting to change that option before trashing the artist name could be a bit of a pain to fix (but is still fixable if you've backed up the library first).

[risingdamp]

...And that's a good example of why my option 2 above would be a neat solution and I expect it's pretty simple from a development perspective too.  Just add an option... 'Build Artist list using field:...'  Then people can select 'Artist', 'Album Artist (auto)' or in my case I'd choose a custom field called 'iPod Artist' that I manipulate manually to suit my needs.

What do you think?

[Chris Shaw]

I've been requesting full field mapping. If this made it into 11.1, I'd implement my organisation idea as a plugin and MC would sell a load more copies to the iPod-car enthusiasts.

[SteveG]

It is a good idea and we would like to implement it.