Import albums to iTunes

Which view are you using that causes separate albums to look like one album?

Ah! You are recording from a vinyl record, and your software hasn't added album names, or more to the point, you haven't added album names to the tracks you've recorded?

What separates one album from another is the album's unique album name (I'll cover the obvious exceptions in a minute). So if you don't fill in the album name on your recordings, then of course iTunes will lump everything together as one album.

For songs that are already in your iTunes Library, you can select a song and click on Edit/Song Info and then type in the album name. If you use the Songs View to sort by Date Added - hopefully, all songs on one album should be grouped together, while another album will also be grouped together, even if they flow together. Study the two screenshots below. The first one (which is a rough overview of the Songs view, so that you can see (generally) what I see:

If I expand part of the picture, to show the songs and the date each was added to my Library:

Notice that the two album in the screenshot are grouped together according to the time they were imported into iTunes. If you set your Songs view to sort by Date Added, you should be able to identify where one album separates from another. At the very least you will be able to identify an album by the track names you've given each song and hopefully, they will all be adjacent. Once you do that, highlight all the songs on one album and click Edit/Get Info. (Notice that it's get info when selecting multiple items, not song info.) you will end up with this view:

Simply fill in the album name and click OK.

Of course, there's always the issue of albums with the same name, such as an artist's Greatest Hits album, usually simply titled Greatest Hits. The simple way around that is to suffix the album name with the artist's name as well. For example:

All five of the albums ringed in the screenshot above are actually titled Greatest Hits which would cause them to be listed as one album. By adding the artist name to the title, it separates each album.

I'm curious, partly because this is the second thread I've seen this weekend about recording from vinyl onto a computer.

• What is the software you're using to record the vinyl's audio coming into your computer?
• When you save the file that it creates, can you specify what format to save the file in (i.e. wav, mp3 etc.)? if so, why not save the file as an mp3 (at a high Bit Rate), to cut out the need to convert it in iTunes?
• When you save the file, is there a field for the album name, that you simply didn't use, or does the software not have that option?

Afterthought:

Actually, here's something to consider: if you can save the audio as an MP3, does the software then give you the option to fill in the album name, whereas the wav option doesn't?

tt2's answer explains a bit more about the limitation of wav files. Basically, since the wav format was implemented, things have moved on and unfortunately, wav got left behind. Modern audio formats, such as mp3 etc. have separate fields for each part of the album (track name, album title, artist, genre etc.) that wav simply doesn't have. When you save your recordings as wav files, you're stuck with those limitations.

I believe your options are:

• in iTunes, use the Songs view, as I mentioned above, to identify all the songs on an album, then edit them as a group to include the album name (and anything else that you might like to add)
• work out whether your software can save the files into a different (and more useful) format (again read tt2's reply), so that any future work you do is easily identifiable
• find alternative audio recording software. Audacity is better in this respect; it can export the audio as an mp3, or as AIFF (mentioned by tt2) complete with all the separate fields.

waynefromseaford wrote:

Any suggestions of some better, preferably free, software?

Thinking about that, it may depend upon the USB turntable and how it transfers to your computer.

There are two ways for the turntable to send information to your computer:

1. analogue: the pure analogue audio is sent to your computer and software on the computer converts that into digital form (which then saves it as wav)
2. digital: the analogue audio is turned into digital form inside the turntable and then a digital (wav) signal is sent to your PC

A clue is that if you needed to install their software onto your computer, that strongly suggests that the turntable is using the first method and sends an analogue signal to your computer, in which case you could try Audacity (there is a caveat, see below). (Oh! and I do know a bit about these things.)

Audacity is free (yes, it really is), so even cheaper than "cheap". There will be a learning curve when you start using Audacity, but the results are worth it. I've been using Audacity for many years, including turning my vinyl into "computerised" (digital) form. (And no, I do not receive any reward or compensation, in any form, for recommending it.)

However, and here comes that caveat; notwithstanding what I said previously about mp3 being built-in, Audacity cannot save as mp3 until you install an extension to Audacity (again, that's free!). I believe this is because mp3 is a licensed product. Yes, the "licence" costs you and me nothing, but because it involves that nasty legal stuff (but we don't actually have to get involved the legal drudgery, you will be pleased to know), it cannot be built-in (I guess, because it's free).

Search for Audacity online. The search results will bring up Sourceforge, but Audacity is no longer available there, so you'll need to go to their own web site. (That should be audacityteam-dot-org.)

I'm sure there are other alternatives, but Audacity is the one I know well. You may find however, that you personally prefer to stick with your current method rather than go through the learning curve. Depending on how much more you have to do, you may feel that the time investment isn't worth it to you.

Oh! one more caveat, this time for Mac users:

At this time (October 2019), Mac OS Catalina does not support Audacity 2.3.2. If that's you, you can read up on this on the Audacity site.

Tried editing my reply but, to quote that oft-used phrase; "something went wrong".

Afterthought:

Here's something to think about: if there is no option to add in the album name when you save as a wav file, but there is an option to save as an MP3 file, check to see if the MP3 option does provide a field for the album name. What do you find?

.wav files are generally untagged. (I believe in principle it is possible, but since most software won't read them if present, no software adds them.) When iTunes imports .wav files to the library all iTunes picks up is the filename to use as the song name, even if there are leading digits that are supposed to be the track number, or the files are in artist and album folders. If it is desired to keep lossless originals then it is better to use AIFF or Apple Lossless where the ripping software supports it.

tt2

Hi tt2 (whatever your real name is... haha)

I understand about the limitation wav files. That's why I'm curious to find out whether the software being used is capable of saving into a different (and more useful) format.

Phil.

I should reserve judgement on that software, but I'm not going to.

Doesn't matter how cheap it is, a product designed to convert analogue music (in other words, vinyl) into a modern, digital format (thereby implying that you can use it on your take-it-anywhere music player) should be capable of saving into the most basic format that an MP3 player uses.

Designers, please note the clue - an iPod is just a fancy name for that breed of "portable digital music player", known as mp3 players.

How hard can this be?

Still, at least you appear to be making progress, which is what matters.

Click on File/Add File to Library, or File/Add Folder to Library.

I know you know, just thought it was worth expounding the details for Wayne's benefit.

tt2 (aka Steve, as you also know well :P )