Daniel Sokolovskiy’s Blog: posts tagged iTunes

My music library editorial standards

Sun, 24 Jun 2018 19:10:40 +0100

I have quite a large music library, and I care about keeping it nice and clean a lot. To do so, I use editorial standards — a set of few simple rules that help to make all titles accurate and informative.

Organizing music library

Today, I’d like to share some of these standards.

Words capitalising

I write all words with a capital letter. This way, all titles look cleaner, and it makes them easier to read on CDJ small screens:

No	Yes
A night in botanic gardens	A Night In Botanic Gardens
The Last of our Kind	The Last Of Our Kind
We come in peace	We Come In Peace

Artists with a comma

When the track has several artists, I used to split them with an ampersand. Then I realised that if there are three artists (and sometimes even more), then things start to get messy. So now I simply use commas instead and put artists in alphabetical order regardless of how “big” their name is:

No	Yes
Relativ & Yestermorrow	Relativ, Yestermorrow
Vini Vici & Avalon & Tristan	Avalon, Tristan, Vini Vici
John 00 Fleming ft. Sascha Cooper	John 00 Fleming, Sascha Cooper
Liquid Soul & Zyce feat. Solar Kid	Liquid Soul, Solar Kid, Zyce
Xerox & Illumination & Sandman	Sandman, Xerox & Illumination

Look how the right column is easier to read. The bottom row on the right in an exception because Xerox & Illumination is a project name as a whole.

Version is mandatory

After the track title, I always add its version, whether it’s an original mix, remix, bootleg, mashup, radio edit, extended mix, dub, vocal, etc. When I see another DJ playing before or after me has some track with the title “Rmx”, I can’t stand it:

No	Yes
Model Reality (Rmx)	Model Reality (Nerso Remix)
Scorchio (Bootleg)	Scorchio (Activa Bootleg)
Existence	Existence (Original Mix)
Indigo	Indigo (Dub Mix)
Freakuencies	Freakuencies (DL Edit)

Note the last row: DL Edit is my edit. It means that I cut the breakdown off, adjusted the structure to make it more DJ-friendly, or somehow edited the track to make it better fit the mix.

An easy fix that would make iTunes better

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 15:38:48 +0100

I’m using iTunes for about six years now. It keeps my DJ music collection nice and organized and works as a central hub for all the music and podcasts.

Organizing music library

But it has one major flaw.

In electronic music, very often there are more than one producer stands behind the song, it’s called collaboration. The problem is there is no way to show this properly in iTunes. As a result, the “Artists” view looks like this:

What does “feat.”, “vs.” and “pres.” means

“Artists” view in iTunes is messed up

Look at the middle column. There are “Ace Ventura & Darma”, “Ace Ventura & Freedom Fighters”, “Ace Ventura & Lifeforms” etc, all as a separate entity in the library. This means if I would want to listen to the entire collection of tracks I have from Ace Ventura, I can’t just do this from the “Artists” view because half of his tracks are collaborations with other artists. And it pisses me off.

This happens because iTunes has only one “Artist” field with a single string of text:

Currently, “Artist” field is a plain text which doesn’t work for multiple artists

And here is a simple way to fix this: just turn artist names into “tags”. Like this:

Suggestion: make artist names as tags. Excuse my designer’s skills, I know it could be better. This is just a demonstration of the idea.

This way we could add multiple artists and finally browse songs properly in the “Artists” view.

I hope Apple will implement this someday, luckily significant changes in the UI are not required.

Setting up a podcast on iTunes

Wed, 14 Oct 2015 07:34:57 +0100

I’m starting my radio show next month I am thinking to make a podcast for it as well on iTunes. After many tutorials and articles, I failed to know how to connect my podcast to iTunes. Can you help me and guide me on how to do so?

Brad Ashtar

Apple has written a guide called “Making a Podcast”. Although it is very detailed and specific, I think it doesn’t give enough understanding of how things work in a simple way. So I’ll try to explain things easier and share my experience on how to avoid stumbling blocks.

First things off, iTunes is nothing but a distributor, the platform to deliver your content to end-users. It means you have to produce and host content by yourself. Assuming you already have a content to deliver, getting web hosting is the first step. You need to have some web space, so you could upload your files and get direct links to it, for instance, www.yourdomain.com/episode001.mp3.

When I started a podcast, basically I thought that file-sharing service like Dropbox can handle it. I thought, it’s easier to upload files this way, and it generates direct file links, thus I don’t need web hosting at all, right? But soon later I figured out that such services have very small bandwidth daily limits, even with paid plans. Here comes the first advice: don’t rely on file-sharing services, get proper web hosting instead.

Requirements for web hosting are quite simple: it has to have enough disk space for your files (I would say, 5 GB is enough if you just getting started), and most important, it has to have large bandwidth, otherwise, you will be billed for extra traffic usage. Don’t fall into a trap of “unlimited bandwidth” that some web hosting companies offer on cheapest plans — most likely, it’s nothing but a marketing trick. So make sure to dig deeper intro hosting plan specifications.

Once you get hosting, it’s time to upload your media files. Apple supports the following file formats: M4A, MP3, MOV, MP4, M4V, PDF, and EPUB file formats. MP3 seems to be the most popular audio format, although, I very recommend to use M4A instead. It has much better compression, while audio quality is equal or even greater. For instance, 192 kbps M4A sounds nearly as good as MP3 256~320 kbps, but the file size is about 40% less. Less file size means you need less disk space on your hosting, less bandwidth usage, and listeners download it faster.

Advanced Audio Coding

Also, M4A has another cool feature. As a container, it can include additional information, such as chapters. You can split each episode into chapters, so listeners can navigate by tracks throughout the episode. I found this feature very handy, especially when listening to a podcast on-the-go.

Episode tracklistings — chapters on desktop iTunes

Okay, you have hosting and audio files. Next step — create an RSS feed. Basically, this feed is a simple text file with an XML extension, where XML is a markup language. It’s great if you familiar with HTML as they are similar at some point, but no worry if you are not.

XML RSS specifications

XML file is made of tags. Tags define structure of the file, and most of them should be written two times, so-called opening tag and closing tag. It looks like this:

<tag>Content</tag>

You can find a description of all tags in Apple’s “Making a Podcast” guide — this is when it’s actually useful.

XML file consist of two parts: the “header” with general information about your podcast, and the “body” with list of episodes. Here is example of the header part:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<atom:link rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://yourdomain.com/feed.xml" />
<title>Your Podcast Title</title>
<link>http://yourpodcastwebsite.com/</link>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>&#xA9; 2015 Brad</copyright>
<itunes:subtitle>Your Podcast Subtitle</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:author>Your Name</itunes:author>
<description>Your Podcast Description</description>
<itunes:summary>Your Podcast Summary</itunes:summary>
<itunes:owner>
<itunes:name>Your Name</itunes:name>
<itunes:email>youremail@domain.com</itunes:email>
</itunes:owner>
<itunes:image href="http://yourdomain.com/podcast_image.jpg" />
<itunes:category text="Music" />

And here is an example of the specific episode. As you can see below, all the information about the episode goes between the item tag.

<item>
<title>Episode Title</title>
<itunes:author>Your Name</itunes:author>
<itunes:subtitle>Episode Subtitle</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>Episode Summary</itunes:summary>
<itunes:image href="http://yourdomain.com/episode_image.jpg" />
<enclosure url="http://yourdomain.com/episode001.m4a" length="182072111" type="audio/x-m4a" />
<pubDate>Wed, 14 Oct 2015 01:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<itunes:duration>120:00</itunes:duration>
<itunes:keywords>tags, of your, podcast, separated, by commas</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
</item>

Feel free to use my XML file as a reference for your feed. Also, I recommend checking your feed by typo and errors every time you update the file.

Feed Validator

Once you fill up the XML file, it’s time to submit your feed to iTunes. This a one-time procedure. Just go to submit a link (it should open your iTunes application) and follow the on-screen instructions. The validation by Apple may take some time, I would say a week. After that, your podcast will be available on iTunes and accessible via search.

Rave Podcast on iTunes

And the last advice: if you do it, then do it. Don’t stop. I know plenty of good shows that no longer exists. Seems not many people realize that having a podcast on a schedule is hard work, but it is so. A podcast is like workouts in a gym: it requires time, efforts, and discipline, but eventually, it pays off.

Getting audience

Once you set it up, drop a link to your podcast in the comments below, I’ll subscribe :-)