[R_burke]

Is there a way to import entire albums as a whole, instead of as a set of individual songs?

I use an iPod classic and in many cases would like to listen to the whole album/cd without breaks between songs and in the order in which it was released.

 

[htbyron]

Not sure what the problem is here, but I suspect it may be with the metadata tags (if there's a problem at all). On my ipod classic, all my music is accessible by album in the order the songs appear on the album -- search by artist or by album or by coverflow. (The question about breaks between songs is different -- you may need to read up on gapless playback: try a search.)

You need to give some more information: Are you ripping CDs or obtaining music files elsewhere (itunes, amazon...)? What software are you using to rip? How do the songs show up in itunes? When you right-click (PC) on a song in itunes and select Get Info, does it show the album name and track #?

 

[tjumper78]

question too vague.
tell us exactly how you are obtaining and organizing your files.

 

[scompton]

I use shuffle by album most of the time. In the settings you can set whether to shuffle by album or song, or turn off shuffle. If set it to shuffle by album, it will play albums in order. If you put shuffle by song, it will play songs in random order, even if you choose to play an album. At least this was how my previous generation iPod worked before I discovered the setting.

 

[ILikeMusic]

Can't you simply select an album and play it? I don't have much experience with iPods but if you do that on a Creative player it will behave just as you describe.

But there are alternatives that will work on any player... you can simply make a playlist with the contents of a single album in the order you want, or if you want perfect gapless playback you can encode the entire album as a single file.

 

[krmathis]

Grab the album art in Cover Flow and drag/drop to the iTunes icon of left side.

 

[scompton]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ILikeMusic /img/forum/go_quote.gif Can't you simply select an album and play it? I don't have much experience with iPods but if you do that on a Creative player it will behave just as you describe.

Yes, and you don't need a playlist for each album like in some players. I really like the shuffle by album though. It randomly picks albums and plays the whole thing. Very nice when you have 700 or so album on your PDP, and 2000 on your computer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ILikeMusic /img/forum/go_quote.gif or if you want perfect gapless playback you can encode the entire album as a single file.

This is what I did before the iPod had gapless playback. I prefer being able to see track names, but as a work around this does work.

 

[R_burke]

Quote:

Originally Posted by scompton /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yes, and you don't need a playlist for each album like in some players. I really like the shuffle by album though. It randomly picks albums and plays the whole thing. Very nice when you have 700 or so album on your PDP, and 2000 on your computer. This is what I did before the iPod had gapless playback. I prefer being able to see track names, but as a work around this does work.

OK, I understand the shuffle by albums, not songs, but please explain the gapless playback - this sounds like what I'm looking for

 

[Juggularity]

Recent versions of iTunes analyze your songs and play them gaplessly if it thinks it should. Otherwise you can force it by doing a "Get Info" from the "File" menu on a song or album and change it to play gapless.

 

[scompton]

By default it plays gapless as far as I know. Basically, gapless playback means that it plays exactly like on the CD. If there's a gap on the CD, you'll still hear the gap in playback.

Most players don't have this and insert a small (up to 2 second) gap of silence between tracks. Most of the time this is fine, but on albums where the songs run into each other on the album, even a half second gap can be very disconcerting and interrupt the flow of music.

I listen to a lot of classical music. Especially on opera CDs, there are usually a dozen or so tracks per act in the opera, but it is continuous music. Before gapless playback, I had to rip each act as 1 track, but then I couldn't pick one aria to listen to if I wanted to.

The best example off the top of my head in rock, is the medley on Abbey Road (I still think of it as side 2). It sounds pretty bad with gaps.

 

[R_burke]

Excellent, thank you all

 

[gechu]

Why the way you store our music matters
Im one of those people who have big problems adopting iPuke,,, iTunes I mean =) But recently I´ve come to the conclusion that a flat folder structure scales better than a hierarchical one. One reason is that in a hierarchical structure leads to higher coupling because information about the entities (mp3 files) has been extracted from the actual entity into the file path. For example, to describe a song by Metallica I have to look at the path, \Albums\Rock\Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3, to know that this file is of the genre "rock" and is created by Metallica with the title "Enter Sandman". And this will lead to complexity as the music collection expands.

Compare the previous described hierarchical structure to a flat structure where information about each entity is held together with the entity in the form of metadata (ID3 tag). To scale I don´t have to put new albums that belongs to the genre "Rock" at one pre-specified location. Well this isn´t rocket science but as I gained this insight I also realised that I had to change the way my music archive was organized. Moving from a classic hierarchical model to a flat one. This is the way I changed it:

A hybrid approach
When I designed my archive I primary had two goals in mind: seamless scaling and a design that supports collections created by me.

First I had to make sure my music was properly taged. This was achieved by using the "Auto-tag" feature in Winamp (quering Gracenote DB). Juding by my experience the automatic taging was about 90 percent correct which I find allright.

Even though I probably wound't find much use of correct folder and file names, I decided to name these artificats in a consistent manner. To do this my plan was to extract information from the ID3 tag.

After trying a couple of applications I found MP3tag (Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v1, ID3v2, APEv2). Great app!

With MP3Tag I was able to create my own actions that worked in batch mode. Using ID3 tag data I could manipulate files in these ways:
- Change folder name to "Artist - Album"
- Change file name to "Track number - Song name"

I also created an action that instead of setting the folder name from ID3 tag data "album" it went the other way around setting the folder name as the album data! This is how I managed to create a logical unit (each had the same album tag) of my own collections.

So now my music archive looks like this:
\albums\
\my Collections\

Wow I almost forgot, you had a question =) Here is what I would have done:
Use winamp auto-tag feature to get all the ID3 tag data (track numbers, artist name, album..). This should probably be enough to solve your problems and if you got inspired by my hybrid folder structure approach, MP3tag is the utility you need. The actions I created wasn´t very hard to create, but just let me know if you need them.

/E

 

[scompton]

Since everyone on this thread before you were talking about iPods and iTunes. I'm not sure why you posted this. I tunes stores the information automatically in ID3 tags for you. It names the track based on the track name. It stores the files in the directory /artist/album/ for non compilations and /compilations/album/ for compilations. As for playback on an iPod, it doesn't matter how you store things on your computer, the iPod puts it where it wants it on it's own hard drive

You seem to be using some other player and/or PDP that doesn't do things right the first time, yet you call iTunes, iPuke. Why don't you thread crap somewhere else.


I use EAC now to rip because it handles problem discs better than iTunes. It's one of the best at handling problem discs. I use itunesencoder.exe to encode in ALAC. I use iTunes to edit ID3 tags, because it is an excellent ID3 tag editor. One of the best I've used, and I tried several a few years ago before deciding that iTunes was as good as if not better than the others. Besides, most won't edit tags in ALAC or AAC.

I agree that Gracenote DB hits 90% on all genres, except classical. There it's more like 10% for me. Since over 50% of my library of 2000 CDs is classical, I do a lot of ID3 tag editing and iTunes makes it pretty easy.

 

[gechu]

scompton, sad to see that you seem to have such as bad day. iPuke was just a joke commonly used by people who have problems adapting to the iTunes way of handling music. And if you would have had any sense of humor you might have understood that it was meant as a joke. And for the record, iTunes is one kind of software for handling your media collection, but whether you own an ipod, or feel like converting your library to a ID3 based library, there are many other options available. In that sense, I feel your comment is way to judging. One example that utilizes ID3 tag information is the Winamp library and nowadays winamp also has a ipod plugin which gives it the ability to write to ipods.

Cheer up!