How not to include artists from collections into main artist list in iTunes?

Question

There are artists I'm listening to and different song collections of different users. Because of these song collections I have a lot of unknown for me names in the main artist list in iTunes. I'm wondering if it can be possible to not include artists from my collection into the main artist list? Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Mark the songs in these collections as part of a compilation and they will not contribute to the artist list.

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You can also specify an Album Artist for these tracks. This will replace their regular Artist for the Artists list.

Answer 2

So if I understand correctly, there are several people using iTunes on your computer, and you would like to keep collections separate for each - or at least your part of it.

I propose you 2 solutions:

1) Use the Grouping field (tag) available in each track as a marker of the user it belongs to.

Simply select your artists or tracks and type your name in this field. Then create a Smart Playlist where grouping = your name. Navigating that smart playlist will now only show your artists. Press CTRL+B to display the Column Browser.

Note that you will need to specify the grouping when you add new tracks. The "Just added" playlist is useful for doing that.

2) Hold the Shift key when starting iTunes. It will prompt you to choose or create a library. This allows you to create a completely separate library for each user.

To avoid having to choose the library everytime, there's a Teridon's script available that allows you to create shortcuts that points to specific libraries, which you can put on your Desktop or Start Menu.

Answer 3

I believe that if you mark the collections as collections, the artists will no longer show up under the Artist. column.

To do this, select all of the tracks from a collection, and choose "Get Info". On one of the tabs (I think it's the last one - don't have itunes in front of me at the moment) there's an option for indicating that the selected tracks are part of a collection.

I believe that you'll have to do this same process for any songs that are already on your ipod.

Depending on the source of the music, you might need to change some of the id3v2 tags to get things exactly the way you want them.