iTunes album fragmentation

[zappaDPJ]

I'm really starting to dislike iTunes with a passion. Why does it insist on fragmenting albums and even worse, why won't it let you simply drag and drop the orphaned track back into the album?

[Simon]

I've had that before, and it's annoying.  My only solution is to make sure that the Info on every track is identical, other than the song titles, of course, and make sure one album is Disc 1 of 1. 

That said, the new version is supposed to have made some improvement on multi-disc albums, but I haven't tried it yet.

[Simon]

Another annoyance is that when you add to a Playlist, and have it on Shuffle, you either have to start the Playlist again, or wait till the device has played all the other tracks before the new ones are heard.  I have a shuffling playlist of about 860 tracks, and I've never got to the end of it. 

[Bill]

@Zappa- I've had that too and yes, it's a pita.

It's often due to one track having a second artist included and you have to edit it to, as Simon says, to make  the necessary info identical on all tracks.

@Simon- the way iTunes v11 does its shuffling is way poorer than the way v10 did it

[Simon]

Hi Bill, I'm taking about when played on a device, such as an iPod, rather than when played direct via iTunes.  TBH, I thought there was a bit of an improvement, in that, when you add to or edit a playlist on the device, it syncs correctly with iTunes, without creating a duplicate playlist in iTunes, like 10 did.  How have you found 11 to be worse?  I stil find it tends to play some tracks much more often than others, and seems to completely ignore some, hence my irritation when I have to start the playlist again. 

[Bill]

Ah, I can't comment on how it behaves with an iPod or whatever- I only use it from either the iMac or (via library sharing), the MacBook.

Shuffle on v10 would take the playlist, shuffle it and play the re-arranged list to the end, then stop. (It displayed other oddities if you also selected Loop). But the point was that it would only play each track once, you could see the order and even alter it to some extent.

V11 selects tracks at random from the playlist without changing the original order. This means there's nothing to stop it missing tracks completely, as you've found, or even playing the same track several times in a row- a behaviour I've seen with very short playlists.

I've got a kludge that works (more or less) for me- I have a Favourites smart playlist. The criteria are:

Media kind is music
Rating is *****
Last played is not in the last 1 day

Limit to 9999 items, selected by random

The "last played" rule means that when a track is played it's removed from the list, hence can't be repeated. When the "1 day" expires, anything played on that day is added back to the end of the list, but in a different order to the one in which they were played.

You can see it working if you use "Add to Up Next" rather than "Play"- Up Next then shows the entire list of upcoming tracks, not just the next 20.

It's not ideal, and may not be appropriate for what you want to do, but it's OK.

I've seen quite a few complaints around the web about the way Shuffle works (or doesn't, depending on your pov), Apple seem to be taking the usual amount of notice

[Glenn]

http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager.php you know it makes sense.

[Technical Ben]

I'm really starting to dislike iTunes with a passion. Why does it insist on fragmenting albums and even worse, why won't it let you simply drag and drop the orphaned track back into the album?

Auto arrange/album info seems to do this at times in Media player. Might be the same type of error. IE, ripping from CD or even downloads that it erroneously rearranges/tags.

[zappaDPJ]

I think some of the problem is the way in which people listen to music these days. They seem to prefer play lists of in-your-face, stand out tracks. The people that developed iTunes must have made a deliberate choice to orphan tracks that for example feature other artists.

Oh I nearly forgot lol, my point being that they probably don't give a flying fig about the integrity of an album track listing.

[Simon]

Ah, I can't comment on how it behaves with an iPod or whatever- I only use it from either the iMac or (via library sharing), the MacBook.

Shuffle on v10 would take the playlist, shuffle it and play the re-arranged list to the end, then stop. (It displayed other oddities if you also selected Loop). But the point was that it would only play each track once, you could see the order and even alter it to some extent.

V11 selects tracks at random from the playlist without changing the original order. This means there's nothing to stop it missing tracks completely, as you've found, or even playing the same track several times in a row- a behaviour I've seen with very short playlists.

I've got a kludge that works (more or less) for me- I have a Favourites smart playlist. The criteria are:

Media kind is music
Rating is *****
Last played is not in the last 1 day

Limit to 9999 items, selected by random

The "last played" rule means that when a track is played it's removed from the list, hence can't be repeated. When the "1 day" expires, anything played on that day is added back to the end of the list, but in a different order to the one in which they were played.

You can see it working if you use "Add to Up Next" rather than "Play"- Up Next then shows the entire list of upcoming tracks, not just the next 20.

It's not ideal, and may not be appropriate for what you want to do, but it's OK.

I've seen quite a few complaints around the web about the way Shuffle works (or doesn't, depending on your pov), Apple seem to be taking the usual amount of notice

I haven't use smart playlists.  What I have is a huge compilation album of favourite tracks, which I add to from time to time, when new stuff comes along, or I hear something good I hadn't heard for ages, and had forgotten about.  This forms the basis of my daily listening, the idea being that I shouldn't hear any particular track more than once in at least a week.  The system fails, though, as soon as I add to the playlist, or play something which isn't in the playlist, like a full album, as then, starting the 'favourites' playlist again, resets it, so even on shuffle, I get to hear the same songs again.  What it needs is a 'resume' function, so that you can restart a playlist where you left it - surely that can't be too difficult?

[Gary]

Since true randomisation is virtually impossible with any list of tracks no matter how big you will get repeats. This occurred on my Sony walkman if I put the whole 20Gb drive on shuffle. Its more a limit of randomising large amounts of data than iTunes or any particular player being the culprit. Computers are lousy random number generators. Google it and you will see.

[zappaDPJ]

http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager.php you know it makes sense.

Missed that, it certainly looks like a viable alternative, I'll check it out. Thanks Glenn

[Bill]

Since true randomisation is virtually impossible with any list of tracks no matter how big you will get repeats.

Whilst the first part of that statement is true, the second part isn't.

If you take a list with no duplicates and shuffle it, it may or may not not be truly randomised but there will still be no duplicates (repeats). Think of shuffling a pack of cards.

That's the way Shuffle worked in iTunes 10.

[Bill]

What it needs is a 'resume' function, so that you can restart a playlist where you left it - surely that can't be too difficult?

I agree- it's done if you stop watching a movie or TV show part-way through (when you select it again you get a "Resume" or "Play from start" option), so it should be possible with a playlist.

[Gary]

Whilst the first part of that statement is true, the second part isn't.

If you take a list with no duplicates and shuffle it, it may or may not not be truly randomised but there will still be no duplicates (repeats). Think of shuffling a pack of cards.

That's the way Shuffle worked in iTunes 10.

I agree but it is not a pack of cards, its a series of numbers really as I said my old Sony hard drive walkman would repeat songs, at some point. iTunes (im guessing here) probably treats each song as a number and they may get pulled out of the hat again unless you assign more processing power to the whole thing, and its only shuffle so I imagine they wont.

[Gary]

I agree- it's done if you stop watching a movie or TV show part-way through (when you select it again you get a "Resume" or "Play from start" option), so it should be possible with a playlist.

Tell Apple via suggestions, thats the best way to see if they will implement this. I tend to listen to specific albums like I did when I had a turntable.

[Bill]

Oh I nearly forgot lol, my point being that they probably don't give a flying fig about the integrity of an album track listing.

There's definitely something odd going on in this regard...

Last year I downloaded an album (Secret Symphony by Katie Melua), it included three (sort of) bonus tracks. Those tracks are no longer included in the Store download (though I assume they're still in my iCloud area), and the iTunes update has split them off into a separate (virtual) CD under the same album title.

Only noticed it by accident (and it doesn't make any practical difference), but I can't help wondering what other tricks they've pulled... think I might get more of my MP3s from Amazon in future.

[Bill]

I agree but it is not a pack of cards, its a series of numbers

But the point is that shuffling a list (iTunes 10) and selecting from a list at random (iTunes 11) are two completely different operations which can (and do) give entirely different results.

The first cannot produce repeats, the second almost certainly will.

[Simon]

If I have, say 50 songs in a playlist, and put them on shuffle, playing continuously, it will play all of those 50 songs without repeats.  However, if I interrupt the playlist after, say, 20 songs, by playing something else, then go back to the original playlist of 50, on shuffle again, I can practically guarantee it will play a lot of those first 20 songs again, rather than playing the previously unplayed songs.  It's difficult to explain, but that's what I'm getting at. 

It knows how many times a song has been played, as you can 'reset plays', but if I go to my playlist, look at the 'number of plays' column, there will be some songs played 20 times, and some songs played zero times, over the same period.  That's what I find odd.  Why does it seem to play particular songs more than others?

[Bill]

If I have, say 50 songs in a playlist, and put them on shuffle, playing continuously, it will play all of those 50 songs without repeats.  However, if I interrupt the playlist after, say, 20 songs, by playing something else, then go back to the original playlist of 50, on shuffle again, I can practically guarantee it will play a lot of those first 20 songs again, rather than playing the previously unplayed songs.  It's difficult to explain, but that's what I'm getting at.

Yes, I understand what you mean, and that's what I found. It's why I then set it up as a smart playlist with automatic removal after playing so that a track couldn't be repeated within a set period. It might be worth a try in your case, perhaps using a short extract from your "real" list- I use the "Rating" field, but any other user field would do if you already use that for something else. The "Grouping" field comes to mind, I use that to indicate where I got the track from- iTunes, Amazon, ripped from CD or recorded from vinyl. Or, in one or two cases, "No Idea"

Why does it seem to play particular songs more than others?

Statistics . I haven't performed a rigorous statistical evaluation of the play count distribution but it looks roughly Gaussian, which is what I'd expect.

The concept of "random" is a tricky one- defining what it means can lead to some very deep philosophical considerations (not to mention mutually contradictory conclusions)!

[Simon]

I'll give the smart thing a try sometime.