Where iTunes Stores Tag Information

Most tag information, including all the tags that identify files, is stored within the files themselves. However, some tag data is stored in your Music library file. This file holds copies of all the identifying tags, and it keeps track of which files you have in your library and which playlists you’ve created. It also contains the Last Played and Plays tags, as well as your ratings. If you move files from one computer to another, tag information stored in your library file doesn’t transfer with the files.

There are ways to get around this—you could create playlists by Rating to record which files have 5 stars, which have 4 stars, which are Loved, etc. You could set up playlists by Plays as well. But this can be complicated, and, in most cases, you’ll lose some information when you move files to a different computer. This is, of course, a feature, not a bug; your spouse may not share your opinions about (and, therefore, ratings of) the music you swap, nor care about how many times you’ve listened to your favorite songs.

Which Tags Are Important

As I said above, your music needs tags for at least Song, Artist, Album, and, perhaps, Genre. Any music you buy from the iTunes Store comes with these tags, along with many others. Music from the iTunes Store also includes Track Number and Disc Number (if needed) tags. If you rip a CD, iTunes adds the Track Number tag automatically, but for multiple disc sets, you should add the Disc Number tag if it’s not there, to ensure that the discs are organized in the correct order. It’s also important to set the Compilation tag correctly.

As for other tags, it all depends on how obsessive you are about organizing your content (I’m somewhat tag-obsessive), and whether you want to use specific tags to create smart playlists. I’ll discuss the uses of other tags next, and I’ll explain how to use them for smart playlists in Organize Your Music and Create Playlists.

Just remember: the more complete your tags are, the more possibilities you’ll have when you create smart playlists.

Move Quickly in an Info Dialog

To work quickly, press the Tab key to move to the next field or press Shift-Tab to move to the previous field. To change panes, use ⌘-key shortcuts: the first pane, Details, is ⌘-1, the second, Artwork, is ⌘-2, and so on.

And, when the single-item Info dialog is open, you can move to the next or previous track by pressing ⌘-N or ⌘-P, or by clicking an arrow button at the bottom of the dialog.

Use Emoji in Tags

You know what emoji are, right? You can use those cute characters ? in text messages and on Facebook, in any text on your Mac, and you can even use them in Music ♫ tags. You may want to put them in playlist names, to have colorful prefixes ? for your favorites. Or you might want to use some symbols in the tags for album or song names, to make certain tracks ❤️ stand out. On a Mac, press ⌘-Control-Space to display the Emoji & Symbols picker, and click any character to enter it. ?

Which Tags You Should Add or Change

You may not need to change any tags, or, depending on your needs and how you use the Music app, you may want to make substantial changes. Here are some scenarios:

• You want to find music when you search: Make sure everything is spelled correctly. Check the spelling of song titles, album names, and artist names.

• You want to browse your library to choose music to play: If you want to view your music by genre, your Genre tags should be consistent; in other words, most of your artists should have all their music in one genre (there are exceptions, of course). If you browse by artist, make sure your Artist tags are complete and spelled correctly, so you don’t have multiple entries for certain artists.

• You’re into classical music and want to sort by composer: If this is your case, then the Composer tag is for you. Fill it in for all your classical music. Be consistent; if you tag some music with Johann Sebastian Bach, don’t tag other music with J. S. Bach. I prefer Bach, Johann Sebastian, because I find it easier to spot composers by their last names when I’m scanning a list. Every time you add new music to your library, make sure the Composer tag matches a name you’ve used already.

• You have a lot of music by multiple artists: A lot of music these days has multiple artists: as I write this, many best-selling songs on the iTunes Store have a “feat.” (featured) artist, or an artist who sings in a song but isn’t the “lead” singer. You’ll want to put the main artist in the Album Artist field; otherwise, your music doesn’t sort correctly. This is the case not only for popular music, but also for jazz and classical; you may have a lead artist on an album, with specific artists you want to note for different songs or works, such as soloists on jazz recordings or singers in operas.

• You’re a DJ: If your job is to keep the beats going steady throughout the night, you’ll probably want to use the BPM, or beats per minute, tag. Be aware, however, that determining the actual BPM of a song is not easy. This isn’t my bailiwick, but a web search will lead you to a variety of options for detecting the BPM of your music.

• You want smart playlists based on the year or decade music was recorded or released: Wouldn’t it be great to make a playlist of everything Miles Davis recorded in 1959? You can do that by filling in the Year tag for all his music. I do that for my Grateful Dead collection, which has lots of live recordings. I can sort their albums by year, and I have smart playlists for each decade, so when I want to hear a great show from the 1970s, it’s easy to find.

• You like to shuffle, but don’t want certain tracks to play: On the Options pane is an important tag: Skip When Shuffling. Select this checkbox for any tracks you don’t want to come up when you use shuffle. I do this for all my classical music, as well as for spoken word recordings. (Although Apple might change this, at the moment, Skip When Shuffling doesn’t work for Genius Shuffle.)

Use Tags to Make Classical Music Easier to Manage

Classical music listeners have long struggled to fit their music into the limited tag structure available in music apps. Classical music often has works with movements, rather than albums with songs. While there are plenty of songs in the classical repertoire—such as Schubert’s lieder and Mozart’s opera arias—the majority of classical music doesn’t fit this paradigm.

The Music app has specific tags for classical music. You can use them with any type of music, but they make sense mostly with classical music.

To use these tags, select a group of tracks that are all part of the same work—a symphony, string quartet, or piano sonata—and press ⌘-I to open the multiple-item Info dialog. Click Details. Select the “Use work and movement” checkbox. As you can see in Figure 49, some new fields are added.

Enter the appropriate tags for your work, and click OK.

You next need to work with individual tracks to apply movement names. Select a track and press ⌘-I. The single-item Info dialog now shows the additional fields (Figure 50).

Enter the movement number of the track (1 of 4 in the figure above), and the movement’s name (Emerson in the figure above). Click OK to save this, or click the left or right arrow button to move to another track in the Info dialog.

When you’re finished applying these tags, the work displays differently in certain views. For example, Figure 51 shows the album I’ve tagged above in Albums view. There are three works on the album, and each work shows its name, followed by the composer’s name, and then the movement names indented below.

Note that this different display also carries over to the iOS Music app, so tracks you’ve tagged this way display in a similar manner, in some views, when you sync them, or when you view them in your Cloud Music Library.

Understand the Compilation Tag

Nothing causes more confusion in the Music app than the Compilation tag, which is labeled “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists.” You set the tag in the Info dialog (⌘-I), in the Details pane. But I’m not sure that this explanation helps to clarify this tag’s purpose.

The Compilation tag tells Music to group tracks with the same album name, even if they are by different artists. In other words, say your album Favorite Covers of Alvin and the Chipmunks Classics has 23 tracks by different artists. If the Compilation tag isn’t set for every track of the album, there will be 23 album listings, one for each artist and album combination. On the other hand, if the Compilation tag is set for a song that’s not part of a compilation, it won’t be listed under its artist, but only under the album name.

There are two ways to see all your compilations. In Artists view, they are grouped near the top of the list, or you can look at the Various Artists entry. In Albums view, they are all at the bottom.

When you set the Compilation tag for files that you rip, Music stores them, on your Mac, in a Compilations folder, with subfolders for each album name.

It’s worth noting that you can’t have two compilation albums with the same title. Music looks at the title, and the state of the Compilations tag, to group these tracks. So if you have two different “Greatest Hits of the 1840s” compilations, they’ll be grouped together.

Add Missing Album Art

You have two options for adding missing album art. You can either download it from the iTunes Store or you can hunt it down on the internet and copy it to your music files.

Star Ratings

Before you can apply a star rating, you need to turn on this feature. Choose Music > Preferences > General, and in the Show section, select “Star ratings.”

There are several ways to set star ratings:

• Control-click one or more items, and then choose a number of stars from the Rating submenu. For example, choose five stars for a top song, or choose None to remove an existing rating.

• To set a number of stars for the currently playing tune, hover over the track name in the app header, click the More icon, and then choose a number of stars from the Rating submenu (Figure 53).

  

• Use the rating stars, as shown in Figure 54. You can access these stars in Artists, Albums, Genres, Composers views. If you have applied ratings to tracks, the stars will be visible, but if not, hover your pointer over a track to set a rating.

  

  To remove a rating, click a bit to the left of the leftmost star, or Control-click the track and choose Rating > None.

• You can rate albums as well. In some views, as in Figure 54, above, album rating stars display in the album’s header bar. If you hover your pointer over that area, you can rate the entire album; or you can click the More icon and choose Rating, and set a star rating there.

• In Songs view, you can display a Rating column, where you can click stars. See Songs View.

If you rate a song, its rating stars are blue, and the album rating shows an average song rating in gray stars. If you rate an album, but not its songs, all the songs of the album get gray stars showing the album rating. For example, in Figure 54, above, the blue color of the stars by each individual song indicates that the songs were rated. I rated the album 5 stars, so that shows up in the header. If you don’t rate an album, but rather rate individual songs, Music displays a computed rating, using the average of the song ratings, in light gray stars.

Tip: You can also set half-star ratings in the Music app. To do so, you’ll need to run a command in Terminal. I explain this in an article on my website, Use Half-Star Ratings in macOS Catalina’s Music App.

Love/Dislike Ratings

The Music app has two other types of rating: Loves and Dislike ratings. The Love icon lets you set a binary rating for any track or album. If you click it, you love it; if you don’t click it, you either don’t love it or haven’t yet made up your mind.

Loves and Dislikes are useful if you use Apple Music; the service takes them into account when it makes music recommendations, but it ignores any star ratings you have applied to your music. You can, of course, dislike music that you own, but unless you care about seeing which songs you hate the most, there’s not much use to this. However, you can access Love and Dislike ratings on iOS devices, so you may want to use both when rating your music, then refine these ratings later with stars in Music.

You can set Love and Dislike ratings in many ways, including:

• Control-click one or more items, and then choose Love or Dislike.

• Click the More icon on the app header when a track is playing, or next to a track, album name, or playlist, then choose Love or Dislike.

• Hover over a track’s name to see the Love icon display to its left. If you click this, it shows a red heart, as you can see in Figure 54, above.

• In Songs view, you can display a Love column (see Show Columns in Songs Views to learn how to display this column). For an unloved track that you want to love, hover over the track to see a Love icon in the Love column and click the icon. Curiously, there is no Dislike column.

You can use both star ratings and Love/Dislike ratings, if you wish. This combination allows you to have very granular ratings: those tracks that you really, really love, perhaps, and others that you rate with stars.

Plays and Skips

Plays are the number of times that you’ve listened to an audio track or watched a video. The Music app increments this number automatically, whether you listen to it on your computer with Music, or on an iOS device. Plays change when you’ve finished listening to an entire track, or when you start listening to another track within the final 10 seconds of the current track. If you use iTunes Match or Apple Music, plays increment each time a track is played on any device that uses Cloud Music Library.

Skips are how many times you’ve skipped a track, by clicking or pressing the Next icon, either in Music or on an iOS device, after it has played for at least 2 seconds, but before the last 10 seconds of the track.

You can use Plays and Skips as conditions for smart playlists; common uses are smart playlists that collect songs with zero plays, songs you haven’t listened to; and favorites, those with the most plays.