Hi Andrew, What's happening is that you have created two rules for your smart playlist, and there are two possible ways to apply them: by matching "any" of the rules or by matching "all" of the rules. By default, when you create the second rule, which might be "Artist is <some name with the alternate spelling", the check box at the start of the smart playlist changes from "Match the following rule:" to "Match all of the following rules:", where "all" is a pop up menu button that you can change to "any". So one way to fix your smart playlist is to stop interacting with the "rules section" of the smart playlist after you've entered your second rule, and navigate back (VO-Left arrow) to the start of the smart playlist and VO-Space on the pop up menu button to change it from "all" to "any". Once you've made that change, your smart playlist should populate with tracks from both spellings of the artist's name.
There are a few other ways to handle this. You could decide to use a standard spelling of your choice and apply it to the "Album Artist" field of all tracks by this artist. This would leave all the metadata supplied by the iTunes Store alone, but allow you to add an additional "Album Artist" tag, assuming this is not already being used. Then you could make your smart playlist rule "Album Artist is <whatever spelling you adopted>" and avoid the artificial distinctions of having the artist's name spelled different ways by different labels. The other advantage is that you would be able to use the column browser, and specify the option to "Use Album Artists" under the "Column browser" sub-menu under the "View" menu on the iTunes menu bar. In instances where there is an "Album Artist" field entry, this entry would be used instead of the "Album" field, and you could also make your selections in the column browser according to a single spelling for the Artist's name. You may find that simply being able to use the column browser to select by "Album Artist" that you supplied may remove the need to create a separate smart playlist. Incidentally, while use of Unicode characters for non-Latin characters should work perfectly for iTunes on the Mac, there used to be some instances where importing non-Latin characters to iTunes on Windows didn't always handle characters correctly. This was true some years ago, and I don't know whether the problem still exists. So if you wanted to export a playlist to use in iTunes on Windows and were using non-Latin characters in the tag fields, these wouldn't always appear correctly. I usually work directly with a single set of rules when creating a smart playlist, but another way to approach this process is to create separate smart playlists (e.g., one for each spelling of the artist's name that was used), and then to create a smart playlist out of your existing playlists. The criterion would be "Match any of the following rules", and the individual rules would be "Playlist is <name of your playlist>". The intermediate step makes it easier to check your individual playlists before combining them with the final smart playlist, and can help troubleshoot complex smart playlists which have many different levels of rules, and where the final result may depend on the order in which those rules were applied. HTH. Cheers, Esther Andrew Lamanche wrote: > Dear Listers, > > I'm trying to create a smart playlist in iTunes. I want to make sure that all > of the songs by a prticular particular artist are automatically added to this > list. Here is my problem. The artist is not British and I have albums which I > purchased from iTunes which in which his name and album name are spelt with > Latin characters but also albums where his name is spelt in non-Latin > characters. > > Now I have specified the criteria to be artist is and the name in Latin > characters and that works but only for the albums where his name is spelt in > Latin characters. If I add another criteria which specifies: artist is and > name in non-Latin characters then my smart playlist is suddenly empty with no > entries and iTUnes gives me a warning that some of my criteria clash. Can't I > specify two different artists in my criteria? What am I doing wrong? > > Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. > > Andrew > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
