[kagenaki koe]

Originally Posted by Tiger

when you download a cd mainly by one artist but has some collaborations, itunes doesn't create one album, but creates individual ones for the collaboration.

there is a field for ARTIST and a field for ALBUM ARTIST (under get info). itunes organizes it on the hard drive by ALBUM ARTIST (if that field is filled) otherwise it uses ARTIST (except when songs have PART OF A COMPILATION clicked...more on that later). You can leave the ARTIST field by itself (ex. Black Sun Empire and Evol Intent) and type in Black Sun Empire in ALBUM ARTIST (this way the primary album artist will have that album under it's folder...it won't show up under Evol Intent however). If it's an actual compilation, if PART OF A COMPILATION is clicked (or YES), the album will show up in a folder called COMPILATIONS (or Various Artists depending on what is listed in ALBUM ARTIST). I personally prefer to have compilation songs organized with the actual artist(s), so i have PART OF A COMPILATION clicked off (or NO) and i make sure to leave ALBUM ARTIST blank (this ensures that the album gets filed under the artist). For guest vocalists etc, i remove their name from the artist field and add their name to the song title instead (or anywhere as long as it isnt the artist or album artist field). ex. you don't want multiple folders for Tricky feat. Martina Topley-Bird, Tricky feat. Alison Moyet, Tricky feat. Terry Hall,..you can just have it under Tricky since he's the main artist.

a number of my older cds son't have artwork, not a huge issue, but can you cut and paste images from the internet for this?

yes. there's also a "automatically find artwork feature", but sometimes it doesnt grab the right artwork. i think there are artwork grabber apps you can use outside of itunes (but i've never used them).

i downloaded about 100 albums from an external hard drive onto itunes, and in the main it seemed to work ok. however when i tried to play these or sync with my ipod it said 'computer says no' or 'the song could not be used as the original file could not be found. would you like to locate? do i simply get round this by having my hard drive plugged in when i sync with itunes?

if you want files to reside on the external, then the external needs to be plugged in to use those files. if you wanted them to reside on your main drive, in preferences under ADVANCED, click on COPY FILES to itunes media folder. you can also specify where the itunes media folder resides (default is in your user/main drive...but you can have it link to an external...the etxernal ALWAYS has to be plugged in for you to use files on it)

also when downloading these albums from the external harddrive some were mixes, and instead of it loading one mix, it loaded all the individual tracks. i know when its cd you can join tracks, but is there a way to manually do this?

some of these downloaded songs/mixes have just gone into a catch all file of unknown artist/unknown album. i can't change them as its the locate issue i mentioned two paragraphs. but when i've got them properly downloaded is it just a case of clicking the get info tab and adding their name/artist and they automatically get moved into the main list?

burn them to a cd and join the tracks. you'll end up with one file of the entire mix and you'll still have the individual files if you wanted to listen to each track separately

finally i have a number of bands who i multiple ep/single releases by and i don't want all these listed as individual albums. can i just create a b-sides/misc album and put them all in this?

just change the album name on all of them