Organizing Compilations on iPhone/iPod Touch
Posted under: Edit 15/01/2012 : Users of iOS5+ will notice that artist sorting has been changed. Your iOS device will now list the artist listed in the “Album Artist” field rather than the “Artist” field when sorting your music by Artist. This mean you can simply change the “Album Artist” field to be something like “Various Artists” or ”The Cast of Grease” and then all the separate compilation artists won’t clog up your list.
If you’re anything like me your iTunes library is pretty immaculate. With tools like iArt or TuneUp it’s pretty easy to keep your library lookin’ good. This is all fine and dandy until you want to take your music on the go. On non-touchscreen iPods, there’s a menu option (Settings>Music>Compilations) to turn compilations on or off. When this is on, tracks in your library that have been tagged as ‘part of a compilation’ won’t show up in the artists menu. This is a great option if you have a few compilation or soundtrack albums as it keeps your artists list from being cluttered with one-off artists. This option, however, is NOT on the iPod touch/iPhone (seriously wtf?). Fear not, as in this guide I will show you have to bring about some organization to your music listings.
- First make sure all the albums/artists that you don’t want mixed into your regular artists are marked as “Part of a compilation” in your iTunes library. (Select songs>Get Info>Options>Part of a Compilation>Yes)
- Create a smart playlist (File>New Smart Playlist) and Match the Following rule[Compliation] [is true]Don’t limit the number of items.
- Select the New playlist and select all songs (Ctrl+A)
- Right click> Get Info > Sorting > Sort ArtistPut a “0″ (zero) in the “Sort Artist” field and hit okay. iTunes will edit the metadata and this may take a few seconds.
- Sync your iPhone/iPod touch with the new tracks.
Super. Now when you browse your music on the iPod by artist all of the artists we tagged as part of a compilation will be at the very bottom and not scattered all over.
The biggest problem is that you cannot have two of the same Artist entries in your iPod. So if you have a track by Frank Sinatra that is part of a compilation and a legitimate albums you will only be able to find Frank at the bottom with other one-song wonders (Poor Frank). You can remedy this by removing the “0″ in the sort artist field for artists which have non-compilation albums.
Let me know if you’ve got questions in the comments. The last couple steps are shown in the image below.
This is far from a perfect solution but it’s the best option I could find. I’ve contacted Apple countless times about this (seriously, how hard could it be to implement?) but they’ve never taken any action. Let them know you want a better option in iOS by submitting some feedback to Apple
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Meet Derek
Derek Wilson is an undergraduate mechanical engineer at the University of Saskatchewan. He has a passion for technology, music and theatre. He's a natural problem solver with a knack for building wombat houses out of used leather belts.
Thanks for this suggestion, this has been driving me mad for ages. It really takes the piss that they won’t fix the firmware.
The WORST thing about ipod touches and iphones is that they don’t have scrolling titles, like what is that about? Every mp3 player has that feature!
Ugh, I totally agree with you. The worst is when a bunch of podcasts all start with the title and there’s almost no way to tell which specific episode it is. It really wouldn’t be that hard to fix, I just don’t understand Apple.
I did some research and apparently scrolling titles along with the option to “sort by album artist” will be included in iOS 5, wooopie
Excellent! Only took them 4 years… but they’ve done it!
Great tip! Thanks!
Great stuff, you helpled me out so much!
i’m on ios5. this really didn’t help.
i mean, the checking compilation thing did. thanks for that
but still i have 20 instances of each album, under album sorting. it didn’t fix that
Hey Sarah, I mostly look up my music by artist so I hadn’t really considered how it looks under album sorting.
Here’s what I came up with though:
In the “Get info” pop-up in iTunes
Artist — Whatever the artist name is for the track
Album Artist — Make this the same for all tracks in the compilation (I used “Various Artists)
Album — The album name
Sort Artist — 0 (Like I explained in the article)
Hope that helps. What’s really important is that they all have the same “Album Artist” field.