My playlists in iTunes are a complete mess. I don’t have time to sort them out. Recently there are have been a variety of postings at various places online suggesting ways to incorporate tagging for songs of the sort used at places like the wonderful link management site del.icio.us (My tags are here by the way). Briefly here is how it works: 1) You assign certain tags or key words to identify your songs (for example “vocal” “folk” “dark” etc.) separated by spaces. 2) You then use this data later to find songs matching the particular combination of characteristics you want for any given listening session.
I have decided to use the “Grouping” field which each iTunes song has (it was originally meant for identifying groups of songs in classical music). I modified a wonderful open source Applescript written by Chris Brown called TuneTag which allows you to add tags to the Comment field of a song so that it instead adds tags to the Grouping field instead. You can download my modified version of his tag.scpt script here.
I use a great and very unique free program called Quicksilver which lets you use various short cuts to common functions on your computer. If you don’t have it, and want to try this iTunes tagging, install Quicksilver. Then put the modified tag.scpt into ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/ (where ~ is your user folder, you may have to create the Actions folder). Restart Quicksilver.
Then when you are listening to a song you want to tag just: 1) activate Quicksilver (Command-Shift-Space in my clase), 2) press “.”, 3) type the tags you want to save for the song, 4) press “tab” to go to the “Commands”, 5) press “t” and it will show the tag script as an option, 6) press return. Trust me, this is a piece of cake after the first time as it is just a few keystrokes and you never really leave the application in which your working (Quicksilver “floats above” what you are doing and disappears when you are done issuing the command).
It is also much faster than going into iTunes finding the song that is being played, opening its get info window, going to the info pane, and typing the tags in the “Grouping” field and exiting the dialog box and itunes to go back to whatever you are doing.
What can I do with this? Well, once you have lots of tagged music, you can create “Smart Playlists” in iTunes which includes only songs that have certain tags (add the condition that “Grouping” “contains” [whatever tag you want it to have]).
This sound very useful. Is the “Groupings” field stored with the MP3 metadata, or is it only saved in iTunes, like ratings? I ask because I use multiple libraries (with the excellent cross-platform application “Libra”) and ratings are not shared between libraries. However, if I could modify the MP3 metadata written with the song, then I could actually preserve ratings across libraries which would be great. (I wish Apple would get their act together about multiple libraries in all the iLife apps.)
Good question…
http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0.html#sec4.11
has mention of the “grouping” tag but not sure it is talking about the same thing…
However, MP3 Rage tag editor doesn’t list it…
Yes the grouping tag is stored inside an mp3 so if your itunes library gets messed up your tags will still be ok
I’ve built a lightweight plugin for iTunes (Windows) that does the same thing using the Comment field. It’s got type-ahead suggestions and a “frequently used” tag cloud to make tagging easier. While it currently only supports Windows, I’m hoping to port it to the Mac soon. If you’re running iTunes for PC you might want to check it out. And please let me know if you do. I’d love to hear your feedback.
Great blog entry BTW. Wishing for Quicksilver on my PC…
Whoops! Here’s the link:
http://www.tweetweb.com/
Thanks Jake, looks interesting! Would love to hear about it if it gets ported!
Thanks Konrad, I’ll try it out. I’ve been using the grouping for quite a while and it would be nice to have something easier to use. It’s ok to go into itunes and update one song for grouping..but to update 50 or more songs which might have some grouping tags already in it…it is a pain, you can’t update all of them or you’ll overwrite the existing tags.
BTW. The grouping tag does get saved in the id3 tag of the mp3 so it is available to other applications. I also run mediamonkey and use the grouping tag there also to set up smart playlists.
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