Over the weekend, someone started a thread asking why an artist’s album view in Apple Music has gotten so cluttered.
To see this for yourself, pick a relatively modern artist and check out their list of albums in the Music app. For example, fire up Siri and say:
Show me all the Bruno Mars albums
When the Bruno Mars page appears, scroll down to the Albums section and tap See All. Amongst the actual Bruno Mars albums, you’ll find a lot of singles and EPs. Way more singles and EPs than actual albums, in fact.
Now it certainly is great to have a complete list of all of Bruno Mars’ music at your fingertips. But sometimes you want to find an album. And there is a lot of clutter.
Personally, I think it’d be nice if there was some way to declutter the list, have a view without all the duplicated remixed singles.
To get a sense of the core of this problem, take a few minutes to read Kirk McElhearn’s excellent post, How iTunes Handles Albums, EPs, and Singles. From the post:
With digital music, everything has changed. When you see a bit of text on a website or in iTunes, all you know is the name of the release and its artist. David Bowie’s Let’s Dance could be a single, an EP, or an Album. This is because the tags – the metadata that identifies music – doesn’t allow for this type of differentiation. iTunes uses a simplified version of the ID3 tagging system, which doesn’t offer a tag to identify what type of release a record is. (MusicBrainz does use a tag called Release Group, which can be used to distinguish between singles, albums, and EPs, but also broadcasts and “other.”)
So how can you distinguish between these different formats in digital? The only way is if the record label has tagged the name of a release with the word “Single” or “EP.”
Bottom line, this is not a trivial problem to solve. Not, at least, without the cooperation of the labels. But seems to me, this is a problem worth solving. And if I, as a human, can step through an artists list of albums/EPs/singles and quickly suss out which items on the list are albums, surely this is the kind of problem that would yield to a well applied bit of machine learning.
And once Apple Music knows the difference between albums, singles, EPs, etc., it’d be easy enough to add a filter to let me search through only albums, or only singles for that matter.
Apple says music is in its DNA. Too bad iTunes is in its attic.
My issue with Apple Music (and all streaming services like it) is that I cannot edit the metadata for any track. Here’s an example of why this matters. I watch a lot of reality competition shows like X factor UK and American Idol. They release lots of music each week from the contestants on those shows. But each song is its own single, which means that if I want to listen to a contestant’s journey on the show, I have to make lots of playlists (cluttering up that view) or rely on “up next” every time. Instead, I like to put all of these songs together as an album. If I buy music from the iTunes Store, I’m free to do this. If I use Apple Music, I can’t edit song information. I know it’s a niche use case, but it really makes a huge difference to me.
If anyone has the brawn to extend ID3 to include more useful information, it’d be Apple.
(Then again, it’s 2017 – maybe it’s time to move to metadata in XML rather than in defined-bitfields, because we don’t have to assume stone knives and bearskins.
And equally iTunes could emit both on export, etc., as needed.
Plus, well, there’s the way AAC’s metadata is all roll-your-own, and most non-Apple uses of iTunes metadata seem to be via Bluetooth profiles that have their own metadata system, so … low impact?)
Equally, though, I share skepticism about how good Apple even tries to be with metadata – the “genre” info on ITMS is beyond laughable, even if it’s not all Apple’s fault.
This is where I think Spotify has a better grasp on tagging. When you search for an artist, you get Albums, Singles, and Compilations (which are usually greatest hits collections). You’ll also get a section called “Appears On” which are usually various artist compilations. To me its just a better experience. I still subscribe to both services and I like them both but I find myself using Spotify more because it’s easier to find what I want. However, if Spotify doesn’t have what I’m looking for, Apple Music usually does.
There is no reason Apple Music needs to rely on ID3 tags (I’m not even sure if they do). Human curation of the metadata about artists, songs, and albums is key to useful music platform. The next step beyond that is tools that allow users to easily search and manipulate this metadata for their own uses (i.e. custom playlists, personalized genre designations, etc.)
I just tried editing the album name for a selection of random Apple Music artists and iTunes allowed the change and shows my custom album in “Albums” view.
Now, I don’t know how long the change will “stick” or how it syncs across devices (if at all) but it was allowed.
We lost the album long ago. We’re in a bit of a doldrum now. I find the average album to have one tune that is worthy. A decent album has a few good tunes. And the very rare album has mostly good tunes. But the concept album, I just don’t see that come around at all any longer.
iTunes has a tag called “Grouping”, which could be used for this. I used it for many years with classical music works, to keep their various movements together. Since iTunes has woken up to classical music somewhat and offers better treatment of classic works and their movements I no longer require this.
The Grouping tag could contain type, title and even record label order number of the issued media.
XML? JSON, please? 🙂
When searching for John Williams albums, you know the Star Wars composer, I also get albums by John Williams the guitarist. No way to distinguish this in the search. Both are ‘Artists’.
In that case, the metadata would not be portable. Since it’s embedded in the files, you can transfer the files to another device and retain the metadata. Adding an additional file of metadata to each audio file would be useless.
I wonder what you mean by “roll-your-own.” For the most part, iTunes metadata matches ID3 tags. The exceptions are user-specific metadata, such as play counts, ratings, etc.
Yes, iTunes and Apple Music use a subset of ID3 tags.
Yes, there are also two Bill Evans (a pianist and a saxophonist), and there is The Lounge Lizards and Lounge Lizards, which are two separate artists. There is a lot of work to be done there, but that would require a broader database of artists that extends beyond Apple.
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I know ID3 tags are used in the files, but I meant what Apple was using as the source of their metadata.
The edits stuck, they synched across devices, and by using “Various Artists” for the Album Artist field, the album stays grouped together.
You can make the change on a computer using iTunes, but you cannot make that change on an iOS device. And over a longer period of time, I experienced times when the Apple Music metadata over-wrote my changes.
I can’t even edit my own music metadata on iOS. ?
seems like they could just group albums into “Full” and “Singles & More” – any album that has fewer than say 7 tracks is in the second group. Sure it would fail for weird avant garde albums with one track or singles with 6-sides, but it would solve it for 99.9% of the artists and albums people care about.
haha @ Genre. such a classic example of the futility of attempting to globally label something that is subjective!
Thanks for battling these issues behalf of iTunes users everywhere. Apple would be wise to hire you as a consultant on this.
Yeah, I don’t see that happening. I have a history of criticizing Apple, when they deserve it.
Yes they do, for portability. When you download files from other sites, you want iTunes to be able to read the tags. When you tag your files in iTunes, you may want other apps to be able to read them (car stereos, for example).
That’s using ID3 tags as an interface. Apple can ingest tags and generate tags even if behind the scenes data is stored in much different schemas.
No, that’s ensuring interoperability with ID3 tags. If you tag files, you want those tags to be portable, not get lost when you move the files (as do ratings, play counts, etc, for good reason).
Yes, that is what an interface is. It is like RSS, a standard most blogs can generate, even though blogs may have very different storage mechanisms under the hood.
I think you’re missing the fact that the tags have to be in the files so they are portable. Also, they have to be compatible with tons of other devices, which can’t just pick up tags that don’t match the ID3 standard, or use iTunes-specific tags.
Of course the tags have to be in the files. iTunes just has to be able to generate the tags appropriately for any files it is tracking and to ingest tags from files that get imported. Beyond that iTunes can use whatever internal system it wants to manage metadata. When you do a search in iTunes, it doesn’t go out and read the tags of every file it tracks to see if it matches the search, it is hitting an internal database or index. This is even more clear when it comes to Apple Music, which searches over millions of tracks. My only point was that Apple can leverage any data it wants for search, curation, and organization without having to be limited by ID3 tags. Clearly any data not able to be represented in the ID3 tags wouldn’t be portable outside the Apple ecosystem, but that’s not likely a huge concern at this point.