One common complaint I hear from many iPod users is that the Artists section has too many redundancies in it. The most prevalent occurrence is an Artist featuring Some One. Rappers are famous for bringing on a huge posse and thus you get LL Cool J featuring Janet Jackson or Fat Joe featuring Ja Rule & Ashanti. Of course if you get enough of these featuring people going, Fat Joe will fatten up your Artist list and truth is, he’s only one artist. If you’re like me, having over 85 GB of music can make going through your artist list a bit tedious.

It would be nice if Apple added a feature that would show “Similar Artists” much like it’s wonderful “Show Duplicate Songs” feature. But you can get around this by simply searching for “featuring” in the Song field. For me, it brought up a large amount of songs that I then edited and moved the featuring mark to the song title which is common practice in liner notes. Within a few minutes, I reduced my Artist count down to 1741.

The next phase of reduction is going through all your classical music (if you have that.) Most classic works put the symphony or conductor down as the artist and then you, once again, get this bloated list. At this point a personal decision on how you’d like to handle this has to be made. If you’re more in tune to the conductor than the composer, then keep it as is. If you would rather keep everything together by composer, like I do, then go and find all your classical by sorting Genre by Classical and then make the changes. To keep the conductor in the meta file (so you can still do searches,) move their name to the Comments field.

These two changes will greatly reduce your scrolling the next time you look for LL Cool J’s song he did with Janet.

2 Responses to “Cleaning Up iTunes Artist Information Helps Your iPod Stay Slim”

1. Brian Says:
   May 16th, 2006 at 12:21

   The one change I would like to be able to make is to hide artist names on the iPod. I have over 50 gb of music, I have no idea how many artist that is. I do know there are artist with one song on my iPod, I will never listen to their song individually. I may listen to them in there respective playlist or compalation album. So there is no reason to have to see their name or scoll past it when I am looking for Tom Petty and I have to start my seach with .38 speical (numbers before names on my iPod)

2. Sven Says:
   May 17th, 2006 at 10:50

   Brian, go into iTunes and uncheck the songs you don’t want to sync into your iPod. Then go into your iPod settings (right click the iPod in the Source column and select “iPod Options”) and check “Only update checked songs”. This will now prevent any songs without a check mark in your iTunes library from being exported to the iPod. Due not, though, when you put unchecked songs in a playlist, only the first song plays (that you start) and the rest of the unchecked songs in the list will be skipped. I just make a list, check them, play the list, and then uncheck them when I’m done if I need to. No biggy.