Tip: International music support in iTunes smart playlists
This is a solution for those who have music in different languages in iTunes and who use smart playlists. Almost half of my music in my iTunes library is Russian. Since most Russian CDs are not in such directories as CDDB or Gracenote, I have to manually fill in the information about each song and album. On top of this layer of difficulty there is another: I don’t have a keyboard with the Russian alphabet. Thus I have a few choices when it comes to filling in album and song details for my Russian songs:
- Type the song details using Latin letters, so a song titled Незаконченный Роман would be spelled Nezakonchenniy Roman
- Type the song details in Russian letters – just as it would appear naturally: Незаконченный Роман.
- This option was really difficult and time-consuming since I would enable the Russian keyboard layout and then enable the virtual keyboard in OS X, and then peck away with the mouse at the virtual keyboard. But it became so much easier when my mom showed me a different Russian keyboard layout called Russian – Phonetic. Basically, it’s a keyboard layout that maps Russian letters to their English phonetic counterparts.
Naturally, after finding out about the Russian – Phonetic keyboard layout, filling in Russian song details has become much easier and faster. Now to the point of the post!
I have set up Smart Playlists for different genres of my music library. These Smart Playlists are auto-updating and are set up to randomly fill my iPhone with music. This way, I have a new, random collection of music – organized by genre – on my iPhone every time I sync up. (If you are wondering whether my music library is bigger than the 8GB my iPhone can hold – it is. The Smart Playlists are limited to 100 songs each – that’s how they fit on the iPhone.)
But how do I differentiate between genres of music from different countries? For example: how do I have a Smart Playlist for Russian pop music and a separate one for pop music in English? How do I do this and still keep the neat organizational genre structure? The solution came to me after a few days: label genres of Russian music in Russian and make separate Smart Playlists for it! For example: I have “Pop” as a genre for English music. For Russian pop music, I will type “Поп” in the genre field in iTunes for Russian pop songs and make a new Smart Playlist for Russian pop music.
![iTunes \"Pop\" genre in Russian - screenshot](http://technestreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/itunes-genre-russian-pop.jpg "iTunes \\"Pop\\" genre in Russian - screenshot")
![iTunes \"Pop\" genre in English - screenshot](http://technestreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/itunes-genre-pop.jpg "iTunes \\"Pop\\" genre in English - screenshot")
This solution can work for any genre type. Moreover, it can work for those who are just exploring international music and don’t really know how to say or spell a certain genre in the language where that music originated. So say I want to create a Smart Playlist for Italian metal music, but have no idea how to say or spell the genre “metal” in Italian. Well, I can simply label it as “Italian – Metal” (creating a Smart Playlist for that genre) or use a translator to translate the word “metal” from English to Italian. I would get “Metallo”. Of course, this would only work for those languages whose alphabets are Latin-based (read: English-looking), since someone without an understanding of say, Greek, could not know that “μεταλλο” means “metal”. But one can always learn, right?
Posted in TNR tip
This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.
Leave a comment
Additional comments powered by BackType