Managing Your Single Tracks

If you've been playing at home, you know that we advise you to only upload and keep music that you actually enjoy listening to. This means that you may end up wanting to only keep a few songs from certain albums instead of the whole thing. Instead of simply deleting the unwanted songs and leaving the bones of once mediocre albums scattered throughout your collection, you can create pseudo-folders in which to put these songs. Of course you aren't able to actually create folders in the Google Play music application, but through a creative use of tagging, all of your one hit wonders will finally find their place!

Google Play sorts everything that isn't assigned a track number in alphabetical order. This includes the Album, Artist and Genre pages, and you can use this to your advantage.

If you have any albums in your collection that have parenthesis in the title, you will see that they are listed before any other albums. Examples of this would include the Oasis album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? and ( ) by the band Sigur Rós. If you find albums like this interfering with the process listed below, you can take the same approach as Wikipedia and slightly alter the name of albums, calling the first album What's the Story Morning Glory?, the second Parenthesis, and so on. It's your collection, and no one will be the wiser.

You can then use parenthesis to create easy-to-access 'folders' for songs that do not fit in elsewhere. How you eventually sort your music will depend on the types of music in your collection. Instead of having many separate mediocre compilations and greatest hits albums curated by record executives, you can be the judge of what is a greatest hit or best one hit wonder of the 1990's. You don't necessarily have to use parenthesis in the album titles for these custom compilations, but it really does help to have them grouped together and at the top of your album list.

There are several different ways you can sort your single tracks. One useful approach is to separate them into collections similar to radio stations, such as an 80's channel or a collection of novelty music. This will allow you to categorize large collections of music while keeping it somewhat easy to locate without searching. It's much easier to remember that your two Wang Chung songs are filed under 80's rather than English New Wave or something just as specific. Of course, if your collection of English New Wave singles is gigantic, this might be a suitable category for you. 

Here is a summary of the tags your need to edit in order to group your single tracks together: 

Name: This is the title of the song
Artist: This is the musician or band performing on the track you are editing.
Album Artist: If you are creating a compilation of many artists, then you want to note that there are Various artists on this album. Various!
Album: This is the name of the album or compilation. If you want the album listed at the top of your list, put the title in parenthesis, for instance: (Eighties Music).

If you find a track on another album that you want to 'move' into one of your custom collections, edit its tags, making sure that the Album and Album artist information are identical to the compilation you are moving it into. Unless you find it absolutely necessarily, there is no need to use track numbers as a part of these large collections of single tracks. By removing the existing track numbers, Google Play will sort these songs alphabetically, making it easier to find individual tracks in a list. There is currently no easy way to reorder albums with large numbers of songs without individually editing each song, so it is not really practical to try and maintain order with these large compilations

Once you get each individual collection going, it will be much easier to find what you want to hear and see what is missing so that you can acquire it later. You will be able to spend more time tracking down and listening to good music, and less time searching and sorting through the same old junk.