No way to organise albums in Apple Music?!

[apple fan23]

Does anyone know a way to organise albums in Apple Music? I have a gazillion albums but they can only be 'sorted' (by unhelpful sorting options) but I have so many it is just way too much scrolling. Many of my albums are classical music and I'd like to have folders with 'Bach' or 'Violin' or 'Indie' etc. music in it. I used to create playlists and then put those into folders but now they've taken away the ease of saving a whole album as a playlist as you have to fill in all the details manually and there is no album picture anymore. I would have to make a note of all the album details separately, google and download album art, then click 'new playlist', copy it all out into the album details, upload an album pic and then add to an existing folder. Seriously that is mad, when I can just save an album under 'albums' - except I will never find it again (oh what was that great album I was playing the other day, it has a black and white picture on the front, and I forgot the name of the soloist - try and find that). I really don't want to go back to Spotify (assuming this functionality of folders and saving albums as playlists is still there). It really is a crazy work around when all we need is some sort of folder function in the 'albums' section.... Anyone got any tips?

 

[bradman83]

What about setting up Smart Playlists to capture albums of a similar style/artist/genre and then setting the View/Sorting to by Album? I do that for certain artists where I have a lot of their albums; the smart playlist pulls in everything by that artist and then I set the View as By Album so I click into the artist's smart playlist and get a view of just their albums.

You can also do it by genre, composer, or any other metadata category so long as the metadata is complete (that's a big if, it sounds like some of your collection is missing some).

 

[apple fan23]

Thanks, not a bad idea and will have a play around with it, but first attempts gave very limited results as it does not include songs that are not by the search parameters but that do feature on an album. So how to include an album in the 'Bach playlist' when 5 out of 20 songs are not by Bach....

 

[bradman83]

Thanks, not a bad idea and will have a play around with it, but first attempts gave very limited results as it does not include songs that are not by the search parameters but that do feature on an album. So how to include an album in the 'Bach playlist' when 5 out of 20 songs are not by Bach....

I believe Apple Music (and iTunes before it) has a Composer field in the metadata specifically for instrumentals where the composer and the performing artist are different. You could try setting up the smart playlist based on composer instead. You may need to do some manual tagging based on how complete the metadata in your library files are, but you can select multiple songs and bulk edit the data flags (ie: select everything you know is by Bach and adding him into the Composer field). You can do the same for album art which you know is missing, you should be able to just copy and paste missing art in bulk to the fields.

I used to spend hours painstakingly curating the metadata for the 11,000+ songs in my library so I feel your pain on this.

 

[apple fan23]

thanks again for thinking along but it wouldn't work because I want to have a whole album and they often feature different composers. So if I make a smart playlist based on composer it would not give me the whole album. I would have to list that album by performing artist. But a smart playlist by performing artist is not very smart if you have only one album by that artist. In other words you'd have to make smart playlists based on the unique metadata of each album because very few albums have similar metadata that would function in a smart playlist. Unfortunately I don't think this is the way to go....